Top-down teaching

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Abstract
This paper advocates the positwn that the primary source of our collective difficulties in teaching introductory programmhg is that our goals for CS 1 and our tools for teaching it are seriously and irreconcilably mismatched. While we have been preaching top-down methodologies for many years now, we have been teaching languages that support most directly bottom-up prograntnu"ng. Such languages, which focus primarily on the details of coalng and algon"thms, en$orce a tactical paradigm which obscures from our students the more giobal, strategic issues we want them to develop and appreciate from the start. Object-oriented languages, on the other hand, allow us to concentrate initially on top-level &sign considerations, and to progresw"n true top down fashior+to working, worhble programs that embody the principles of sofmare engineering and program sty(e. The following &scribes a new lab- based implementation of CS 1 which we are now developing mung Object Pascal. Our intut"tion and our experience to &te indicate that it better prepares more stucknts than does the prewx"ling pedagogical mo&L

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