CS1: Introduction to Programming

The CS1 curriculum is designed for students in 8th or 9th grade with algebra readiness skills. No prior programming experience is required. It is inspired by a highly successful Intro Computing course (15-112, Fundamentals of Programming and Computer Science) that has been taught at Carnegie Mellon University for the past 10+ years.  It is predicated on the notion that learning about programming and computer science should be fun and engaging.  This requires interesting problems to solve, as computational problem-solving is the core of computer science. It is why we choose to first expose students to graphical problems in CS1:  they are visually engaging, allow for multiple correct solutions, and provide visual cues when a solution goes awry. 

There are 12 Units to the course, the course is split up into two parts, CS1a (units 1-7) and CS1b (units 8-12) so that it can be taught as a year long course or two semester based courses. We believe the best way to learn this material is to do it, so each unit provides content for the topic to be investigated, a worked problem(s) to illustrate and let students explore the topic, a set of exercises to hone their mastery of the topic, some end-of-unit exercises that require students to use and synthesize all the topics found in that Unit, and a creative task that lets them further explores the topics in the Unit in a manner driven by their interests.