Category Archives: Uncategorized

CS Principles (with Alice) Peer Instruction Materials

Topics Coverage Summary: Alice: methods (class and world level), parameters, events, functions, if statements, counted and while loops, lists.  Excel: functions and formulas, relative and absolute addressing, linking Excel functions to Alice concepts (e.g. vlookup, average, etc.)

Materials Author: Beth Simon, University of California, San Diego

A Short Article on How to Implement A Peer Instruction CS Principles Course: A pre-print from ACM Inroads June 2012

More detail on the UCSD pilot of CS Principles also in ACM Inroads
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Theory of Computation Peer Instruction Materials

Topics Coverage Summary: Deterministic Finite Auotmata (DFA), Nondeterministic Finite Auomata (NFA), Regular Expressions, Pushdown Auomata (PDA), Context-Free Grammars, Turing Machines, Decidability, Halting Problem, Undecidability, Diagonalization, Reductions, P vs NP.

Number of Questions/Slides Available: 
– Regular languages: 25 questions
– Context-free languages: 21 questions
– Turing machines: 10 questions
– Decidability, undecidability, cardinality, halting problem, diagonalization: 34 questions
– Reductions, polynomial-time reductions, P vs NP: 14 questions

Materials Author: Cynthia Lee, Stanford University
Additional Contributors:
Alex Tsiatas, UCSD
Thérèse Smith, UConn
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CS1 in Java Peer Instruction Materials

Topics Coverage Summary: Simple execution/multiple objects with turtles, Pictures and Sound, Pictures: loops (for each, for, while), if statements, 1-D and 2-D arrays.  Sounds: repeat of loops, if statements, and 1-D arrays.  Basic introduction to class design, getters/setters, constructors.

Materials Author: Beth Simon, University of California, San Diego
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Programming Languages Peer Instruction Materials

Topics Coverage Summary: This course focuses on three different paradigms – functional, object-oriented and logic programming, as embodied in OCaml, Scala and Prolog.

Number of Questions/Slides Available: 18 lectures of slides with about 5 PI questions each (lectures also include standard explanatory slides).

Materials Author: Ranjit Jhala, UCSD
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