Rice PLT TeachScheme Project: Slides: TCEA State 1998: AP Without C++

TCEA State 1998 Slides

What About the AP Exam?

We encourage teachers to use a split approach to preparing students for the AP exam. We recommend that the first 4/5 of the time be spent covering the important concepts in Scheme, and the last 1/5 on showing them to translate from Scheme to C++. This approach has been used by a company in Florida, Schemers, Inc, very successfully for years now. They estimate that it takes 10-18 hours to teach students the translation.

The split approach has numerous benefits over just teaching in C++:

Students understand the principles better
Less time is spent covering the principles
More material can be covered, enabling students to better appreciate the applicability of concepts and the trade-offs
Students learn to switch between languages

The last of these is actually quite important. Employers are increasingly finding that students taught in only one language know just that language, while those who have been exposed to several different languages have a better grasp of the underlying principles, and have little trouble adapting as the language du jour changes.

Other approaches---such as teaching Scheme for the first semester, and C++ for the second---would also work.

PLT / scheme@cs.rice.edu

Last modified at 17:04:54 CST on Thursday, January 11, 2001