Curriculum Design and Evaluation for Introductory Computer Science Course

Common curriculum designs for introductory computer science courses consist of various topics, but those topics are quite noncoherent. Due to the non-coherence, students would have great difficulty in understanding the relationship between the natural language of the problem and the electron flow in the devices inside a computer. In this paper, we present the coherent curriculum design of this course. We first introduce the levels of transformation, including problem description, algorithm, programming languages, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, circuits, and devices, from top to bottom. Based on the levels of transformation, students obtain a whole picture of how a problem is solved by the devices inside a computer. Then students learn the structure of a computer. We adopt an educational ISA, the LC3, to form the foundation of this coherent curriculum design. Based on the LC3 ISA, students learn to write machine language programs and assembly language programs and run those programs in the LC3 microarchitecture. We also adopt a GUI-based LC3 simulator to demonstrate the information flow in the LC3 data path. This helps students understand the detailed behavior of the computer hardware and software. We evaluate the proposed coherent curriculum design based on students' performance and questionnaire. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed coherent curriculum design. The coherent curriculum design improves students' final scores. The mean scores of coherent curriculum design outperform the ones of noncoherent curriculum design.