Program design in file structures [by students]

The importance of emphasizing design in programming stems from the desire to train students in thinking more about solving the problem than programming the problem. Although sitting in front of the computer causes the student to think that he or she is getting closer to a working program with every passing minute, the student may actually spend more time on the program than necessary. More time is spent because the student may have written the program with the wrong approach and figured that out only after many hours of debugging. Further, the program may not be organized very well, which also leads to long debugging periods. To help the student streamline the development of programs, formulating a design of the program was necessary before actual code could be written in a senior-level file structures course. The design component became necessary as the instructor watched students fail to complete the more complex B-tree and hashing programs. The design component also confirmed the correct or incorrect thought processes of the student so that incorrect notions could be corrected before programming was completed. The design component includes drawing the file structure to be implemented and examples of the operations upon it. The design then goes into further detail by requiring the student to split the problem up into subprograms specified in pseudocode. The design process undertaken by the students is analyzed and reported in this paper as to how it helped the students to understand the file structure concepts better.