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ABSTRACT

As Computer Science educators, we know that students learn more from projects that are fun and challenging, that seem "real" to them, and that allow them to be creative in designing their solutions. When we have students beating down our office doors wanting to show us what they've done, we know we have designed a project that truly meets its pedagogical goals. In CS1 courses, it is often difficult to come up with large, real-world programming projects that are at an appropriate level and that really excite students. This is particularly true in the first half of the course when students are learning basic programming and problem solving skills. We found that assignments based on image processing are an effective way to teach many CS1 topics. Because students enjoy working on the projects, they come away with a solid understanding of the topics reinforced by the projects. In this paper, we discuss many ways in which image processing could be used to teach CS1 topics. As an example, we present two image processing projects that we use in our CS1 course. These large, real-world programs are designed so that students can successfully master them early in their first semester of programming. Even though our CS1 course is taught using the C programming language, these projects could easily be used by a CS1 course in C, C++, or Java. We provide starting point code for Java and C versions of the projects, and provide sample assignment write-ups on our project webpage [12].

REFERENCES

• 1: Harold Abelson , Gerald J. Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996
• 2: Owen Astrachan , Susan H. Rodger, Animation, visualization, and interaction in CS 1 assignments, Proceedings of the twenty-ninth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.317-321, February 26-March 01, 1998, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/273133.274321]
• 3: Kevin R. Burger, Teaching two-dimensional array concepts in Java with image processing examples, Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, February 19-23, 2003, Reno, Navada, USA [doi>10.1145/611892.611970]
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• 5: Harriet J. Fell , Viera K. Proulx, Exploring Martian planetary images: C++ exercises for CS1, Proceedings of the twenty-eighth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.30-34, February 27-March 01, 1997, San Jose, California, United States [doi>10.1145/268084.268093]
• 6: Michael T. Goodrich, Data Structures and Algorithms in Java, John Wiley & Sons, 2005
• 7: Kenny Hunt, Using image processing to teach CS1 and CS2, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.35 n.4, December 2003 [doi>10.1145/960492.960535]
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• 11: Sun MicroSystems. Java Swing Library, part of the Java 2 Platform. http://java.sun.com/j2se/.
• 12: Wicentowski, R., and Newhall, T. Two image processing projects for a CS1 course. www.cs.swarthmore.edu newhall/imagemanip/.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.2 Computer and Information Science Education

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
CS1, computer science education, image processing projects