Using the BURKS 2 CD-ROM in a principles of programming languages course

This paper describes the structure of two, self-paced, language-translation tutorials that integrate nicely into a principles-based undergraduate programming languages course, thus bringing material normally covered in a compiler course down into the context of a traditional programming languages course. The primary goal of the tutorials is to provide students with useful models for programming language principles as well as a very basic introduction to compiling techniques, including tokenizing, parsing, static semantic checking, and code generation. The paper also exposes a pedagogic technique of repeated exposure that drives the success of these tutorials.

In order to facilitate problem-based learning in our Programming Languages course, we developed a tutor on static and dynamic scope. Static scope includes the scope of variables, the referencing environment of procedures and the scope of procedure names in a language that permits nesting of procedure definitions (e.g., Pascal, Ada). Dynamic scope includes the scope of variables, and the referencing environment of procedures. In this paper, we will describe the design of our tutor, and present the results of evaluating it for two semesters in our Programming Languages course.

While the programming languages course played a key role in Curricula '68, '78, and '91, Curriculum 2001 replaced most of the content in programming languages with sections on learning to program. We argue that the need for a programming languages course has not diminished, but instead increased, especially as we move into an era of many-core computing.

This paper aims to study the new changes in higher education in the post COVID-19 era and proposed an innovative Online-to-Offline (O2O) blending teaching model, named BOPPPS-SPOC by tracking a C programming language course. BOPPPS-SPOC indicates implementing BOPPPS mode for SPOC (Small Private Online Course). BOPPPS is an acronym for 6 components: Bridge in, Objective, Preassessment, Participatory learning, Post-assessment and Summary and it makes the classroom teaching arrangement more logic and rationality. The new changes are: (1) Teaching Methods: From separated online and offline teaching to an online-offline blending teaching. By adopting the new BOPPPS-SPOC method, the traditional offline and online independent teaching, implemented in a serial way, is optimized into offline and online blending teaching, implemented in a cross-parallel way, and it effectively expand the time and space scope of classroom teaching; (2) Course Evaluation: From single-dimensional evaluation to multi-dimensional evaluation. It focuses on the construction of a fusion evaluation system, mainly including the formative evaluation of teaching process and the sum. Finally, a survey from an authoritative research institution is conducted to 334 universities in China. It shows about 95% of students are able to adapt to an O2O blending teaching.

The programming language concepts which ought to be presented in the comparative programming languages course (either graduate or undergraduate) are all covered by choosing C++, Java, Perl, and Python as the languages to be compared. These include dynamic typing, object orientation, multiple inheritance, interpreters and compilers, keyword and default parameters, generics, operator overloading, complex numbers, universal hierarchies, exceptions, and garbage collection. We describe such a course, which we have given.

In the present decade, education is entering to the world of online learning and focusing to a learner as the center of education. To manage learning system successfully, the education courses: Learning management system (LMS) based on the online learning has been developed. In this study, LMS was developed for Programming Language course for the students of Rajamangala University of Technology Phra Nakhon by using the principle of software development life cycle (SDLC) process. Additionally, the development of the program was done via important major phases of planning analysis, design, implement and evaluated by experts in this field. From 60 randomly selected students of the Faculty of Science and Technology, online Programming Language course providing modules based on LMS model via the Internet showed higher efficiency of 85% than the control in the standard usual instruction procedure. All these aspects of system performance evaluated by the students were also at high level and satisfied with the developed lesson described on the web. Therefore, this online learning system is helpful for all learners in the present information technology world. This system would be further applied for other courses with other additional interactive systems.

Hundreds of programming languages are in use todayscripting languages for Internet commerce, user interface programming tools, spreadsheet macros, page format specification languages, and many others. Designing a programming language is a metaprogramming activity that bears certain similarities to programming in a regular language, with clarity and simplicity even more important than in ordinary programming. This comprehensive text uses a simple and concise framework to teach key ideas in programming language design and implementation. The book's unique approach is based on a family of syntactically simple pedagogical languages that allow students to explore programming language concepts systematically. It takes as its premise and starting point the idea that when language behaviors become incredibly complex, the description of the behaviors must be incredibly simple. The book presents a set of tools (a mathematical metalanguage, abstract syntax, operational and denotational semantics) and uses it to explore a comprehensive set of programming language design dimensions, including dynamic semantics (naming, state, control, data), static semantics (types, type reconstruction, polymporphism, effects), and pragmatics (compilation, garbage collection). The many examples and exercises offer students opportunities to apply the foundational ideas explained in the text. Specialized topics and code that implements many of the algorithms and compilation methods in the book can be found on the book's Web site, along with such additional material as a section on concurrency and proofs of the theorems in the text. The book is suitable as a text for an introductory graduate or advanced undergraduate programming languages course; it can also serve as a reference for researchers and practitioners.

The college students who have relatively weak academic background feel more difficult in learning programming language grammars and programming skills in introductory course. At the end of semester, most of students had the negative attitude to programming and only a few students could write the programs for the given problems because they spent most of time to learn grammars instead of learning problem solving skills and logics. In this study, we propose to use Scratch in introductory programming course to help students to understand grammars and problem solving skills. It's necessary to educate first-time programmers how to solve the problems before they learn grammars of the programming language in their first programming language course. This paper shows that Scratch allows students not only to learn problem solving skills in programming but also to motivate students themselves in the class.

Computer scientists often need to learn new programming languages quickly. The best way to prepare for this is to understand the foundational principles that underlie even the most complicated industrial languages. This text for an undergraduate programming languages course distills great languages and their design principles down to easy-to-learn 'bridge' languages implemented by interpreters whose key parts are explained in the text. The book goes deep into the roots of both functional and object-oriented programming, and it shows how types and modules, including generics/polymorphism, contribute to effective programming. The book is not just about programming languages; it is also about programming. Through concepts, examples, and more than 300 practice exercises that exploit the interpreter, students learn not only what programming-language features are but also how to do things with them. Substantial implementation projects include Milner's type inference, both copying and mark-and-sweep garbage collection, and arithmetic on arbitrary-precision integers.

The object-oriented theory has been widely used in software design and development and Java programming language is a popular object-oriented programming language for computer science related majors in higher education. With the huge demand for intelligent manufacturing employees in the work market, more and more universities have listed Java programming language in their curriculum for non-CS undergraduates. However, learning object-oriented programming languages, such as Java, is tough even for CS students. This paper presents how to improve non-CS undergraduate students’ learning outcomes of java language by adopting industry standard professional integrated development tool Eclipse and interactive visual educational tool BlueJ. Our Java programming language course is an alternative 8-week course including 16 h lecture and 16 h lab. Forty-seven junior students from mechanical engineering major were divided into two groups, 23 in the control group (CG) and 24 in the experimental group (EG). Students in both groups used Eclipse to write and run programs during the course while BlueJ was adopted to demonstrate the object-oriented concepts during the fifth and sixth weeks only for students in the EG. A pre-test, which was taken by students from both groups, shows no statistical differences in programming knowledge between the two groups. Results from the post-test at the end of the sixth week show students in EG achieved better performance than students in CG. Results of the survey for the EG reveal that students thought BlueJ was helpful for mastering the concepts of object-oriented programming.KeywordsJava programmingLearning outputHigher educationInteractiveVisualBlueJEclipse

Computer scientists often need to learn new programming languages quickly. The best way to prepare for this is to understand the foundational principles that underlie even the most complicated industrial languages. This text for an undergraduate programming languages course distills great languages and their design principles down to easy-to-learn 'bridge' languages implemented by interpreters whose key parts are explained in the text. The book goes deep into the roots of both functional and object-oriented programming, and it shows how types and modules, including generics/polymorphism, contribute to effective programming. The book is not just about programming languages; it is also about programming. Through concepts, examples, and more than 300 practice exercises that exploit the interpreter, students learn not only what programming-language features are but also how to do things with them. Substantial implementation projects include Milner's type inference, both copying and mark-and-sweep garbage collection, and arithmetic on arbitrary-precision integers.

Three-semester course of programming languages for third-year students of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics Department of Moscow State University is described. Ada and Ada9X are used in the course for demonstration of conceptions and principles of modern von Neumann programming languages.

In this paper, we developed a presentation software for being used in web programming language course. It has functions to display sample source code of web programming language, edit it, and display its execution result in one slide. The reviews by nine teachers proved its efficiency in programming language teaching. By evaluations, good results were obtained for the functions that enable programming classes to be more interactive between the teacher and his/her students.

This paper deals with the development of educational and website maintenance tools using CGI-Programming and Java. The authors present some basics of CGI-Programming and how dynamic document generation can greatly enhance the possibilities of traditional static HTML. Webtools are presented, in the context of a bachelor's degree C++ programming language course at Laval University. This year, over 200 students performed successfully an exam directly over the Net. This evaluation system and some necessary security measures are also presented.

C programming courses in the first or second year of college focus on basic C syntax rather than difficulties and basic skills in a real embedded systems project. An advanced C programming language course has been developed at Southeast University for senior undergraduate or graduate students to fill the gap between typical introductory courses or self-learning and the real project needs. The course organization and main topics as well as the result analysis of pre-course and after-course surveys are discussed. The comparison between the results of surveys indicates that the course organization and topics are effective and helpful for students.