Teaching The Programmer's "Bag Of Tricks"

Prior to entering academia, the author provided supplemental programming education to the new hires for a manufacturer of an embedded system application. Over a twenty year period, he observed the skill set of graduates from a variety of educational institutions, and discovered that they understood the syntax but were unable to conceive or express a solution to many of the problems at hand. They had limited exposure to the problem-solving techniques of the programmer. This paper presents an approach for teaching programming that evolved from the experiences of enabling those new hires to perform their job. It describes how to prepare to learn a language, presents visualization techniques and problem assignments that take a student from zero to fullspeed, and concludes with a series of programming axioms and background information that is essential to every programmer. The author applied this approach to one course of Data Structures in C++ for third-year students who had previously received one or two courses in other programming languages. Selected comments from a survey of the students are included.