What can be done in beginning courses?

• Accommodate a variety of different backgrounds. If the first course weeds out students who have little background in programming, then many talented students will be turned away, including a disproportionate percentage of women. If prior experience is assumed from entering students, then to remedy this loss there would need to be an institutional commitment. Offering a summer orientation course to introduce the necessary principles is one such example. One alternative would be to establish an alternate introductory course, for students with less background, that has more class meetings or a two-semester duration, and to provide more supervised hands-on experience as part of the curriculum.

• Communicate the broad applicability of Computer Science to life and societal issues. Medicine relies heavily on visualization. Biology uses pattern matching. Encryption and privacy are essential for banking and e-commerce. Numerical and statistical computations form the basis for data analysis in science, engineering, and the social sciences.

• Choose projects that make applications clear and that draw upon the students' previous experience. Some examples:
  • Discuss privacy and security issues with the class and have them program an encryption algorithm.

  • Program a code-breaking algorithm.

  • Write a simplified spreadsheet package.

  • To illustrate sorting and searching, write a spell-checker.

  • Write a program to reformat a paragraph to a given width.

  • Write a user-interface for an existing spell-checker.

  • Write a simplified ``draw" program or mail-filter.

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Girls usually score better than boys on verbal tests, and boys have more difficulty than girls in learning to read. But schools do not take this as a reason for letting boys drop out of reading classes. Quite the reverse: most schools have remedial reading classes which are used predominantly by boys. Teachers put extra effort into teaching boys to read to make up for any deficiency, whether its origin is biological or social.
A. Kelly