CS2013-final-report

Tradeoffs: This is an area where there are numerous tradeoffs, including:
• The use of “safer” or more managed languages and environments can help scaffold
students’ learning. But, such languages may provide a level of abstraction that obscures
an understanding of actual machine execution and makes is difficult to evaluate
performance trade-offs. The decision as to whether to use a “lower-level” language to
promote a particular mental model of program execution that is closer to the actual
execution by the machine is often a matter of local audience needs.
• The use of a language or environment designed for introductory pedagogy can facilitate
student learning, but may be of limited use beyond CS1. Conversely, a language or
environment commonly used professionally may expose students to too much complexity
too soon.
Software Development Practices
While programming is the means by which software is constructed, an introductory course may
choose to present additional practices in software development to different extents. For example,
the use of software development best practices, such as unit testing, version control systems,
industrial integrated development environments (IDEs), and programming patterns may be
stressed to different extents in different introductory courses. The inclusion of such software
development practices can help students gain an early appreciation of some of the challenges in
developing real software projects. On the other hand, while all computer scientists should have
solid software development skills, those skills need not always be the primary focus of the first
introductory programming course, especially if the intended audience is not just computer
science majors. Care should be taken in introductory courses to balance the use of software
development best practices from the outset with making introductory courses accessible to a
broad population.
Tradeoffs: The inclusion of software development practices in introductory courses can help
students develop important aspects of real-world software development early on. The extent to
which such practices are included in introductory courses may impact and be impacted by the
target audience for the course, and the choice of programming language and development
environment.
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