I made a better follow-up to this post based on an awesome journal paper that came out around the same time!

This February marks the 50th SIGCSE conference. Also that month, I will be tasked with rolling out University of Delaware’s pilot for a new CS1 course. Naturally, I have been doing a lot of research and reflection on best practices for a CS1 course. I wanted to take some time to jot down some of the big ideas.

  • Active learning is good. Not necessarily easy or uniform, but good.

  • Peer instruction can be a powerful tool. At least one best paper and a lot of great SIGCSE papers came out of this approach. Great website that explains how to go about integrating clickers and peer instruction into your class.

  • Pair Programming also seems pretty effective. I personally struggle to ensure that students follow the model correctly, but even without it there seems to be positive impacts.

  • Functional (De)composition is a good tool. My reading of the “How to Design Programs” folks’ work is that they made progress on the Rainfall Problem by teaching students to solve complex problems by dividing the actions into phases and tackling each one individually. Obviously we all teach Functional Decomposition, but they did so in a intentional way. We might not all need Design Recipes for our students, but we probably need something like it.

  • Contextualization seems to be important for broadening participation. My own research suggests that some contexts may be more valuable than others for certain audiences. Pragmatically, I think you can easily get the best of all worlds by choosing a few different contexts.

Do you have your own addition for this list? Let me know. Preferably with some compelling evidence to back it up.