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Introducing computer science with Project Hoshimi

Published: 20 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Introductory programming course have two very specific difficulties for novice students. First is the lack of real world examples in the sessions. It is very difficult to find areas of application where all the students are familiar enough and that offers challenging and engaging examples. Second it is the lack of palpable results of the job done. Introductory courses in other fields generate products that the students can show to others, and feel proud about it. In CS1, for example, explaining loops by printing a series of numbers on the screen doesn't yield the same sense of accomplishment as drawing a basic perspective in an architecture course. We propose using Project Hoshimi [1], a Microsoft Platform, as a base for introducing computer programming to CS1 students. Through the paper we discuss how it could be implemented in the classroom, the main advantages and disadvantages in our experience of using Project Hoshimi, comparing its use against other more traditional approaches, as well as against other graphic programming methods such as Alice or videogame based learning.

References

[1]
Project Hoshimi official website, Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.project-hoshimi.com/
[2]
Valentine, D. W. 2005. Playing around in the CS curriculum: reversi as a teaching tool. J. Comput. Small Coll. 20, 5 (May. 2005), 214--222.
[3]
Ladd, B. C. 2006. The curse of Monkey Island: holding the attention of students weaned on computer games. J. Comput. Small Coll. 21, 6 (Jun. 2006), 162--174.
[4]
Bergin, J., Stehlik, M., Roberts, J., and Pattis, R., Karel++: A gentle introduction to the art of object-oriented
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Holt, R. C., Wortman, D. B., Barnard, D. T., and Cordy, J. R. 1977. SP/k: a system for teaching computer programming. Commun. ACM 20, 5 (May. 1977), 301--309. DOI= http://0-doi.acm.org.millenium.itesm.mx:80/10.1145/359581.359586
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Powers, K., Ecott, S., and Hirshfield, L. M. 2007. Through the looking glass: teaching CS0 with Alice. In Proceedinds of the 38th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Covington, Kentucky, USA, March 07-11, 2007). SIGCSE '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 213--217. DOI= http://0-doi.acm.org.millenium.itesm.mx:80/10.1145/1227310.1227386
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Bayliss, J. D. and Strout, S. 2006. Games as a "flavor" of CS1. In Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Houston, Texas, USA, March 03-05, 2006). SIGCSE '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 500--504. DOI= http://0-doi.acm.org.millenium.itesm.mx:80/10.1145/1121341.1121498
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Goldstein I.P. 1982. WUMPUS. In Handbook of Artificial Intelligence II, ed. A. Barr and E.A. Feigenbaum. Addison-Wesley.
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Educational Foundation Commission on Techonology, Gender and Teacher Education. 2000. Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age, American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.
[10]
RaptorXP, Finding a good injection point. Retrieved on March 15, 2007 from http://www.project-hoshimi.com/article.aspx?ID=EN/Raptor/ip1
[11]
ZogStrip, Playor V2.0. Retrieved on March 15, 2007 from http://www.zogstrip.info/Playor/
[12]
Richard Clark, Project Hoshimi. Retrieved on March 17, 2007 from http://projecthoshimi.spaces.live.com/

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cover image ACM Conferences
OOPSLA '07: Companion to the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications companion
October 2007
241 pages
ISBN:9781595938657
DOI:10.1145/1297846
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 20 October 2007

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  1. Project Hoshimi
  2. programming

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