Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!uflorida!haven!adm!xadmx!marki%HPIACLA.HP.COM%CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU@cunyvm.cuny.edu
From: marki%HPIACLA.HP.COM%CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU@cunyvm.cuny.e (Mark Ikemoto)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Semester Projects needed for Pascal course
Message-ID: <17873@adm.BRL.MIL>
Date: 17 Dec 88 03:13:23 GMT
Sender: news@adm.BRL.MIL
Lines: 47

>    ...                   I would like that the project require as much
> of the standard theory as possible, e.g. recursion, pointers, linked
> lists, other data structures, etc.

Your students will be tackling all of this in an introductory course?
Wow!  It sounds like I went to the wrong school if I really wanted
to learn something.

I'm kind of skeptical that an introductory course can include all
of the topics you mentioned.  If your students know another high-level
language already then you may be able to get away with having them
learn Pascal and data structure stuff.  Otherwise, most intro
courses I've read college catalog descriptions of just teach the
nuts-and-bolts of a programming language and that's it; some don't
even get to pointers let alone linked lists and their ilk.

You might want to get a feel for what your students will be able to
handle by talking with instructors in your department who have
taught the class before.

The build-on-one-project sounds like a good idea.  But your students
will get enough of this type of assignment in further classes as
they progress up the ranks.

An argument for a-specific-assignment-for-a-specific-idea is that
the assignment does concentrate on the particular mechanism or
concept to be learned; the assignment doesn't have to be restricted
so that it stays conceptually consistent with what part of the
project has been built up to that point (or will need to be built
for further layers or modules).  This offers you a lot of freedom
in what programming task you assign.  If your students need work
in one area more than another, you can assign programming tasks
accordingly without having to worry about keeping on some type
of project schedule.

A strong argument for the specific-assignment
strategy is that if years later a student needs to return to one
of your assignments to look up a concept, they won't have to
relearn the whole semester's worth of project to understand
how the particular concept was implemented.  It's easier to
look for something in 14 listings of 5 pages each rather than in one
listing of 70 pages.

Hope this helps (or stirs up some feedback).


Mark