Introducing functions earlier to enforce programming design stage.

Naugler, David

Program design is one of the most important stages for program development. To many instructors, teaching program design skills has apparently appeared to be much more challenged than teaching how to use a specific language feature. Once a problem is given, students often dive right into the coding stage without thinking the problem through first. Thus, they usually take way too much time to accomplish the job, and most likely end up with some awkward programs. Traditionally, the concept of functions is introduced after the iteration statements because their usages are more meaningful when the problems get more complex. In this paper, the author proposes a strategy to enforce students to use the top-down design approach to solve problems from early on by introducing the concept of functions right after the discussion of output statements and having students to start using simple functions to solve problems.

* Wang, Y. Department of Computer Science, Southwest Missouri State University.