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Visual Studio .NET in Introductory Computer Science Courses
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by Roseann Krane
Monte Vista High School
Danville, California
Elective Computer Science Courses
Teaching an elective computer science class presents the challenge of attracting students to the program. Only a select few students are lured by the rigors of text-based programming languages. This fact, combined with a decline in programming course enrollment, was the deciding factor in changing our beginning course from C++ to Visual Studio .NET. This change allowed us to provide students with more attractive, simpler, graphic-oriented programming material. It also demonstrated that although C++ does provide the ability to program graphics, the transition to using MFC is not an easy one for beginning students.
Introduction to Visual Basic .NET
The year 2001-2002 was our first trial with one semester of C++ using Visual Studio 6.0. When Visual Studio .NET was released, the students programmed one quarter with Visual Basic .NET and one quarter with Visual C# .NET. Students used activities and projects from MainFunction during the first quarter and then completed the same projects and programmed with C# during the second quarter. It was a good curriculum experiment since the students knew the algorithms needed for the program. There was a short and pronounced learning curve to assimilate the language syntax. Student acceptance and success with this first VS.NET course was outstanding.
Students were permitted to load Visual Studio .NET on their home computers through our MSDNAA membership. Students developed programming skills at a faster rate because of this membership benefit (it also provided an incentive for students to enroll in our computer science classes). The enrollment for the following year grew by one third.
Expanding the .NET Experience
The VS.NET course was divided into four quarters, where students learned beginning programming sequentially using C++, C#, J#, and Visual Basic. The students really accelerated in performance and enthusiasm when we moved to C#, as they loved the design form in the integrated development environment (IDE). After the first four weeks using C#, a survey was taken, and the result was emphatically positive for C# as the students' new preferred programming language.
The one difficulty in teaching this course was the lack of a textbook to cover all four languages. The students used a textbook for the C++ portion and online resources (including an online Microsoft book) for the new C# projects. We used textbooks and online Visual Basic projects. Java projects were used for J# that will extend the constructs the students already learned.
Integrating the .NET Experience
All of our programming courses include learning to use Linux, and we emphasize Web development for online portfolio presentations. The students use the Visual Studio .NET design form. They are able to use PHP and ASP easily with the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET IDE. The form design is available for all of the languages, and once the students learn to use it in one language they are able to apply their experience to other languages.
As we explore other languages additional constructs are introduced, and the students quickly note that these constructs work with all of the languages we use. Overall our experiment teaching with the languages of Visual Studio .NET in this yearlong class was successful and many students went on to take the AP Computer Science courses.
Roseann Krane has been a computer science instructor at Monte Vista High School in Danville, California, for over 20 years. She has taught C++, Pascal, BASIC, Fortran, and now Java programming languages. Her newest class is focused on programming in the four languages of Visual Studio .NET. Roseann and her Monte Vista High School student teams are three-time winners of the National Science Foundation SuperQuest competition and two-time winners of ThinkQuest.
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