

Suggestions for Introduction to CS? - theaeolist

I teach at a big research university. Next year I am teaching for the first time Intro to CS and I am very excited about it. The course right now is conventional and stale. Any suggestions for topics or teaching techniques to make it more interesting or relevant? Or, to rephrase: what/how would you have liked to study in an Intro to CS course?<p>One clarification: This is not Intro to Programming, that is a separate course. This is Intro to CS.
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Check out Mehran's Programming Methodology course publicly available on iTunes
and Youtube.

<http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=84A56BC7F4A1F852>

While the course is called Programming Methodology, the focus of the course is
really to teach computer science and what it means to be a computer scientist
and teach solid software engineering principles. The language choice really
doesn't matter and Mehran has said so himself but they chose Java as it had
good OOP principles to teach.

It's by far the absolute best teaching style I've ever personally witnessed
and he makes the classes fun and engaging and very easy to learn from.

One thing I would probably have personally changed would be instead of Java,
use Python (but that is really a personal preference and bias since I like
Python better). Hope that gives you some inspiration. I would try and sit down
and watch the first 3 lectures just to check out the style and the way the
course is structured.

