Marketing the programming languages course

ABSTRACT

Programming languages as a required course is disappearing from undergraduate computer science programs. This is not surprising given that the course often proves to be challenging for faculty to teach and unpopular among students. The author argues that the best way to convince departments to retain this material is to emphasize the benefit to undergraduates of stretching their understanding of programming early in their careers.

REFERENCES

• 1: Richard H. Austing , Bruce H. Barnes , Della T. Bonnette , Gerald L. Engel , Gordon Stokes, Curriculum '78: recommendations for the undergraduate program in computer science— a report of the ACM curriculum committee on computer science, Communications of the ACM, v.22 n.3, p.147-166, March 1979 [doi>10.1145/359080.359083]
• 2: Computing Curricula 2001: Computer Science: Report of The Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula, IEEE Computer Society and The Association for Computing Machinery, December, 2001. http://www.acm.org/education/curricula.html
• 3: K. N. King, The evolution of the programming languages course, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.24 n.1, p.213-219, March 1992
• 4: Daniel D. McCracken, Programming languages in the computer science curriculum, Proceedings of the twenty-third SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.1-4, March 05-06, 1992, Kansas City, Missouri, United States

INDEX TERMS

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

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications

General Terms:
Languages, Theory