Foreword

Thanks

This is an Open Source textbook

That means that anyone can use it non-commercially, or modify it, extend it, translate it into other languages, or even make a movie of its exciting plot. However, any use must stick to the legal fine-print at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

The first chapter is an extract from a tutorial by Yusuf Motara. Find the full tutorial at http://www.ict.ru.ac.za/resources/way_of_the_program/. He based some of it on an earlier version of a Python book at http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/, and that was based on yet an earlier version by different authors. And even though Yusuf wrote most of the text in this chapter, it was subsequently modified by the current author, Peter Wentworth, who bears ultimate responsibility for any errors, omissions, or mistakes...

Why?

As an educator, the book tries to do a few things that are different from many of the usual approaches.

I’m trying to move gently towards the idea of Computation-as-Interaction, rather than Computation-as-Calculation. These days we interact with computational artefacts through GUIs. Notions of events and responses are more prevalent than console-based top-to-bottom calculation. Many of our students have never seen a command-line program, and perhaps some never will. Lynn Andrea Stein’s Rethinking CS101 project has been influential, see http://www.cs101.org/

In recent times the theory of threshold concepts and troublesome concepts has become a fashionable and useful lens for understanding why students have difficulty transitioning to newer ways of thinking about a subject. Although there probably won’t be widespread agreement soon about what exactly the threshold concepts are for our students, the book does isolate and emphasize some concepts like state, flow of control, recursion, representation, data transformation, mental chunking, and so on. If you’ve not encountered this idea yet, see http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV95Rountree.pdf or looking for Threshold Concepts on Google will do the trick.

I like visual examples. Some of our students, sadly, often seem very weak in the cognitive areas of what Piaget theory refers to as “Formal Operations” and the ability to abstract, manipulate, reason about, and control the internal, non-visible state of the program. This means they’re more comfortable with more concrete approaches.

So where possible, I prefer the state of the computation to be explicitly visible. To this end I use a Logo-like turtle, and I use the graphical controls that are available in Windows Presentation Foundation quite heavily. And when we first tackle recursion, I go for turtle-based fractal curves because of this explicit visibility of the internal unfolding of the algorithm.

Our literature abounds too with studies that show that students who are left to infer and construct their own internal cognitive models of computation get it wrong much of the time. So they end up with non-viable models of even the most fundamental ideas, like how assignment works. (Non-viable means their conceptualization may work in some situations, but it gives wrong answers in other cases.) So I put a strong emphasis on debugging, single-stepping, inspecting the internal state of the computation as it runs, etc. in the hope that we can build accurate internal mental models.

Ask yourself or your teaching peers to take their best guess as to what percentage of students typically come out of a year-long programming course with a viable understanding of value assignment, or with a viable understanding of reference assignment. See how that compares with the study at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1227481

And then, of course, we must face the question: “Do we do objects right up front, early, or do we delay them while we try to build the algorithmic and coding skills in a procedural way?” I advocate early exposure to objects, terminology, and use-cases, but late synthesis of objects. A GUI-builder and some turtle examples seem ideal for this. We can work with objects from a library, and build familiarity with the OOP concepts like instances, properties, internal state, lifetimes, events, inheritance and so on way before we get into “Now synthesize your own objects”. On the same theme, I have a distaste for introductory approaches that use very trivial (or minimalist) classes. Nor do I like OOP examples that give rise to just a single instance. Here I find students struggle to separate the idea of the class as a factory, and the instances that it produces.

So from the first time students see the Button type, this book will have at least two instances, or at least two turtles. When we do inheritance, I prefer inheriting from something that already has significant complexity and functionality. (In this book we inherit the Turtle type and give it some extra and some overriding behaviour.)

There is also a tendency in the book to often introduce concepts “informally” the first time, just because we need it for a compelling current example. Then later we’ll hit the chapters where we revisit and cover the concept more fully. So you might bump your head against a while loop in Chapter 7, and some arrays in Chapter 8, even though the chapters on loops and arrays only come later in the book. I hope this provides an early motivating context for the construct or for the feature. It also seems useful to be able to tell students “Sure, we haven’t done that. So go see what you can find out about it on your own.”

The Tips appendix in this book also explains some of my thinking around teaching Computer Science: I like to cover the appendix material explicitly with my students.

Enjoy the book.

Peter Wentworth, January 2015.