Applications programming course using guided design
Curtis R. Cook · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · 1977
This paper describes a two term junior level Applications Programming course. The goal of the course is to provide the guidance and tools a student needs in order to write medium to large sized programs and to provide the experience of working on a “real world” project. Topics covered during the first term are documentation, magnetic tapes, program design, testing, debugging and programming style. The second term consists entirely of student teams doing “real world” projects applying the concepts from the first team. Much of the first term material was presented in the form of Guided Design exercises. In Guided Design, the learning process revolves around student groups being directed towards a problem solution by a series of instruction-feedback materials prepared ahead of time by the instructor. Guided Design exercises were used to synthesize lecture and reading assignments and to do in class example programs.