Research and Practice on Constructing the Course of Programming Language

Programming language (PL) is an important preliminary undergraduate course for computer-related major. In this paper, our teaching idea as well as the corresponding construction approach on this course is proposed. Firstly, the similar courses of some top oversea universities are investigated and discussed; Then, taking account of Chinese students' actual condition and based on several years' teaching practice, the paper argues that the main objective of the course should be to induce the students to grasp the essences of the programming, rather than fall into the trivial details of some specific programming language. Based on this idea, some considerations and concrete teaching approaches are presented, including the division of course contents and teaching sequences, high level case-based teaching by utilizing the open-source platforms of “Robocode” and “Karel world”; Furthermore, the elaborate designing of the course project can also embody our teaching methodology and greatly arouse the interest of the students. The results of the teaching practice show that our teaching idea and methodology on the course is promising.