in Proc. 26th Southern African Computer Lecturers’ Association Conference,
Bakubung, June 1996, pp 65-74
In this paper, I report on a major revision of a new (first run in 1995) Computer Science
2 C++-based course, Data Abstraction and Algorithms. The new guiding philosophy is
abstraction-first learning, aimed at development of a reuse mentality. An important
prerequisite of this approach is the availability of class libraries and frameworks,
which allow non-trivial programs to be written without programming from scratch—but
which are simple enough to be learnt in a reasonable amount of time. Issues covered in
the paper include the content on the course, libraries developed for the course, problems
with C++, and results compared with the year before. The new approach appears to be a
success in that I was able to considerably increase the range of concepts covered.
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