Using J as an Expository Language in the Teaching of Computer Science to Liberal Arts Students

John E. Howland
Department of Computer Science
Trinity University
715 Stadium Drive
San Antonio, Texas 78212-7200
Voice: (210) 736-7480
Fax: (210) 736-7477
Internet: jhowland@ariel.cs.trinity.edu

June, 1996

Abstract:

APL and J are seldom, if ever, used in the teaching of college or university courses. Recently, the author has developed a new laboratory based computer science course for liberal arts students in which students are introduced to 13 core computer science topics. Programming language is used in an expository fashion to describe each topic by building simple working models of each topic. These models are then used as the basis of laboratory experiments in a co-requisite laboratory course. Students are not taught programming in this course, but rather, are taught just enough of the syntax and semantics of the language to be able to read and understand the exposition and models. Initially, Scheme was used in the lecture notes and laboratory materials developed for this course. Recently, however, an experiment is under way to replace the use of Scheme in this course by J. The development of this course and laboratory was funded by the Meadows Foundation and NSF grant DUE 9452050.¹

Subject Areas: Computer Science Education, J, Arts and Humanities, Exposition.

Keywords: computer science laboratory course, J, exposition.