Using a software engineering approach to CS1
James R. Leonard · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · 1991
This investigation used two groups of CS1 students. The control group was taught with a more traditional synthesis approach emphasizing language use using bottom-up explanations. The treatment group was taught with a software engineering-oriented analysis approach and emphasized topdown functional decomposition. The results indicate that a software engineering approach can produce significantly better student performance than a more traditional approach.