Opening a (Sliding) Window to Advanced Topics
Orna Muller, Ayelet Butman, Moshe Butman · 2017
It is widely agreed that an introductory computer science (CS) course should be about more than just programming. Other aims are acquainting students with concepts and principles of CS and developing students' problem-solving skills. In this paper we propose an early introduction of a term often used by computer scientists: the Sliding Window (SW). The term has evolved over time among professionals to simplify the description of algorithms and can be used as well to support beginners when solving algorithmic problems. This metaphoric term enables abstracting and communicating ideas and at the same time it is easy to implement with elementary programming tools. We illustrate a set of stimulating problems in contemporary CS topics that use the SW and may be introduced in an introductory course.