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Unix Literacy for First-Year Computer Science Students

Published: 06 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Many students entering computer science courses today do not have prior experience using a command line interface. Yet, our computing environment is Linux-based, and our instructors expect students to quickly learn to perform tasks like managing files, editing source code, and compiling and running programs from the command line.
This paper describes our effort to close the gap between students' abilities and instructors' expectations. We describe a six-hour non-credit course that runs on a single day before classes begin in the fall term. The course provides hands-on instruction on the use of the Linux command line, which students complete at their own pace. The course also provides instruction on soft skills and resources that will help students be successful in our undergraduate computer science courses. Feedback received from students who took the course was largely positive, with many students praising the value of learning the technical content in a hands-on manner.

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B. Doyle and R. Lister. Why teach Unix? In Proceedings of the Ninth Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 66, ACE '07, pages 19--25, Darlinghurst, Australia, Australia, 2007. Australian Computer Society, Inc.
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A. Gaspar, S. Langevin, N. Boyer, and C. Bennett. Student perspective on an online asynchronous introduction to Linux based on user-first pedagogy. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM SIGITE Conference on Information Technology Education, SIGITE '13, pages 23--28, New York, NY, USA, 2013. ACM.
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C. G. Gray and M. D. Frazier. Introducing computer science after programming. J. Comput. Sci. Coll., 18(1):65--76, Oct. 2002.
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T. Greening. Teaching and learning essential computer science skills: The UNIX example. SIGCSE Bull., 28(2):21--24, June 1996.
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J. Günther. Digital natives & digital immigrants. Studienverlag Innsbruck, 2007.
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R. Hoar. Generally educated in the 21st century: The importance of computer literacy in an undergraduate curriculum. In Proceedings of the Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, WCCCE '14, pages 6:1--6:5, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.
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M. Moy. Efficient and playful tools to teach Unix to new students. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Joint Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ITiCSE '11, pages 93--97, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.
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M. A. Simón-Hurtado and C. Vivaracho-Pascual. Learning UNIX in first year of computer engineering. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ITiCSE '05, pages 392--392, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM.
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R. H. Sloan and P. Troy. CS 0.5: A better approach to introductory computer science for majors. In Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE '08, pages 271--275, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.
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Cited By

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  • (2024)Designing Trainee Performance Assessment System for Hands-On ExercisesProceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Information Systems Development10.62036/ISD.2024.34Online publication date: 2024
  • (2021)TermAdventure: Interactively Teaching UNIX Command Line, Text Adventure StyleProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3430665.3456387(108-114)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2021

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WCCCE '16: Proceedings of the 21st Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education
May 2016
137 pages
ISBN:9781450343558
DOI:10.1145/2910925
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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 May 2016

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Author Tags

  1. CS1
  2. Computer Literacy
  3. Linux
  4. Teaching Unix
  5. Technology Skills

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  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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WCCCE '16

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WCCCE '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 35 submissions, 74%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 78 of 117 submissions, 67%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Designing Trainee Performance Assessment System for Hands-On ExercisesProceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Information Systems Development10.62036/ISD.2024.34Online publication date: 2024
  • (2021)TermAdventure: Interactively Teaching UNIX Command Line, Text Adventure StyleProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3430665.3456387(108-114)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2021

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