I find it difficult to digest that in each of the three articles that were read this week, structured laboratory work was mandated; yet, we at Brown do not use this forum, some 14 years later than this article was written. I am a strong proponent of this method of learning in CS education and have extended this discussion within my Lecture Reflection of CS15. I believe that it is an absolute essential aspect of CS education (laboratory work) yet it does not occur here.

On a more forest level, I find mandating a computer science education both limits professors from experimenting and tries to create a standard track for computer scientists throughout the country. The room for creativity and specializing is lost in the push for clones. What I like best about computer science is that I can be both creative and qualitative simultaneously. This feature is not available to the students who follow this example curriculum. I am taking Math 8 presently, and what I am most getting out of it is the beauty of mathematics. There is a beauty to computer science and this formulaic methodology of teaching cs does not do it justice.

First of all, I'd like to say that I agree with you completely on your second point: there is a beauty to computer science which is lost in the methods describes in the article. As I'm not very far along in the cs deptartment here, I can't really comment on how well Brown does in this respect, but I'd be interested to hear from the rest of you. I think that there is an elegance in programming that really takes creativity and insight. I'd hope that the skill of crafting code is sufficiently stressed here.

I'm not sure I agree with your point about lab exercises. I think that to a large extent syntax is learned by practice. How would a lab help to reinforce the basic comcepts better than actually using them? I'm interested discussing this further, but I'm not sold on the idea yet.

I'm not so sure that cs had that beauty at that time...I think maybe that it has grown in the last ten years. Maybe a few people saw it back then but certainly, the possiblities were not as open as they are now.