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Informing Science + IT Education Conference 2003 Proceedings
| Informing Science + IT Education Conference |
| Pori, Finland June 24-27, 2003 |
| Teaching Introduction to Programming as Part of the IS Component of the Business |
| Susquehanna University, USA |
| Modern software practices call for the active involvement of business people in the software process. Therefore, |
| programming has become an indispensable part of the IS component of the core curriculum at business schools. In |
| this paper, we present a model-based approach to teaching introduction to pro-gramming to general business |
| students. The underpinnings of the new approach are modeling, abstrac-tion, and Bloom's classification of |
| cognitive skills. We employ models to introduce the basic program-ming constructs and their semantics. To this |
| end, we use statecharts to model object's state, the environ-ment model of evaluation as a virtual machine |
| interpreting the programs written in JavaScript, and UML class diagrams to represent the static structure of the |
| designed software systems. The adoption of this approach helps learners build a sound mental model of the notion |
| of computation process. Learners' achievements, student evaluations, and our subjective opinion suggest that the |
| proposed ideas improve the course significantly. |
| Keywords: introduction to programming, model-based approach, teaching programming |
ISSN
1535-07-03
Unless otherwise indicated, this paper has undergone blind external review by three or more reviewers.
Types of Papers: A Best Paper, Regular Paper, Short Paper, Informal Paper,
Unrefereed Panel Paper
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