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Improving Introductory Programming Courses by Using a Simple Accelerated Graphics Library

Authors:

Thomas Larsson, Daniel Flemström

Publication Type:

Conference/Workshop Paper

Venue:

The Annual SIGRAD Conference

Abstract

We present a platform independent and hardware accelerated graphics library, which has been found to be a suitable educational tool for novice programmers. The purpose of the library is to change the nature of the assignments and projects used in introductory programming courses to something that fascinate and stimulate the students, e.g., game creation. We describe our experiences from using the presented graphics library in four different course instances of our introductory C++ course. The course surveys show that most students found the approach interesting and fun. As faculty, we could clearly see how many students became highly engaged in their projects and some of them accomplished solutions way beyond our expectations. In particular, compared to the programming courses we have given in the past, in which a standard framework for creating window applications was used, we have noticed a significant improvement in terms of the quality of the students' project solutions.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Larsson1154,
author = {Thomas Larsson and Daniel Flemstr{\"o}m},
title = {Improving Introductory Programming Courses by Using a Simple Accelerated Graphics Library},
month = {November},
year = {2007},
booktitle = {The Annual SIGRAD Conference},
url = {http://www.es.mdu.se/publications/1154-}
}