Disciplinary Commons
The Objectives and Outcomes shown before are the OFFICIALLY published Objectives and Outcomes; in addition, I personally have the following objectives:
• The value and often necessity of doing ADDITIONAL RESEARCH in programming
• Dealing with VAGUE SPECIFICATIONS, and what to do with them
• “Layers of abstraction”
• top-down design
• ready-built libraries
• Don’t re-invent the wheel!
• Proper documentation - clear, concise, not excessive
• The value of “Beauty” in code and design
• Problem Solving techniques and skills
• Being able to rise to a challenge; stretching the student’s abilities
• Test plans, testing strategies
And, of course, I assume that upon successful completion of CS 211, my students
• can program! (That is, they can take a problem, and create an appropriate program to solve that problem)
Why these particular objectives/outcomes?
This is a simple question - with a very simple answer:
We have these OFFICIAL objectives/outcomes so that our course can articulate to the equivalent courses at as many 4-year school as possible! We started the objectives list in order to be as compatible with the ACM CS-2 curriculum as possible, and then added some specific objectives/outcomes to maintain (and exceed!) parity and transferability with 4-year schools, especially the University of Washington-Seattle.
My personal additions are important because I feel these are Real-Life skills that a programmer needs; I want my students to appreciate the Beauty of “good” code - and to share my excitement over the concept of having layers of abstraction - for example - having a Node object, that allows us to build a Linked List object... that we use to create a Passenger List ... that we can use to create a program to track the Flights of “Wing-and-a-Prayer Airlines”!
I include good documentation because of personal industry experience... having to maintain other people’s code! And while I do not have the warped mind required for a GOOD tester, I feel that every programmer should be aware of testing strategies and techniques.
Basically, my job in this class is to prepare the student for further studies at a 4-year institution, and therefore, my standards must be HIGHER and more exacting than those of the 4-year schools. In order to be accepted as equal, we must often demonstrate that we are actually superior.