The first section of this course on programming introduces LISP as a programming language designed to do symbol manipulation, with consequent prevalence in auto-instructional (AI) work. A programming language specifies in its description a number of primitive operations which the computer knows how to perform. An algorithm is the set of…

This document promotes computer symbolic mathematics and computer algebra as ideal instructional materials for mathematics, science, and engineering students. Further, computer algebra is viewed as appropriate for all students throughout the mathematics curriculum, by serving a vast area of mutual reinforcement and cross-motivation between…

This paper discusses five points related to developmental research on children learning to do Logo programming: (1) systematic developmental research documenting what children are learning as they learn to program is necessary; (2) Logo is cognitively complex beyond its early steps and difficult to learn without instructional guidance; (3) the…

Outlines some of the major innovations found in FORTRAN 77 as compared to FORTRAN 66, emphasizing changes important to the teaching of applied FORTRAN to engineering students. (SK)

This paper presents the results of a project in robotics education that included: (1) designing a mobile robot--the Personal Instructional Robot-1 (PIR-1); (2) providing a guide to the purchase and assembly of necessary parts; (3) providing a way to interface the robot with common classroom microcomputers; and (4) providing a language by which the…

NATAL is a high-level programming language designed to meet the requirements of the course author in the preparation of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) materials. The basis for its design is found in the functional specification published by the National Research Council's Associate Committee on Instructional Technology; developers of the…

In addressing the question of whether learner control of instruction can accommodate individual differences, this paper discusses some characteristics of learner control, including those conditions of learning which the student can control and those imposed by society and its institutions which are not under individual control. Studies of attempts…

APL (A Programing Language), a computer language used thus far largely for mathematical and scientific applications, can be used to tabulate a survey. Since this computer application can be appreciated by social scientists as well as mathematicians, it serves as an invaluable pedagogical tool for presenting APL to nonscientific users. An…

These papers describe efforts toward the systematic improvement of a software environment called SOLO (Eisenstadt, 1978), which has been used with cognitive psychology students at the Open University in Great Britain and is geared towards the manipulation of assertional databases. The first paper, by Eisenstadt, Laubsch, and Kahney, provides an…

Four conference papers are reviewed in this introduction to a symposium. The first paper is by Clements and Merriman, who make a case for the reflection of Steinberg's information processing componential model of cognitive processes in the LOGO language and computational environment; present a series of experiments that attempted to tailor the…

In this paper a hardware/software system is described which permits the use of the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I as a tachistoscope in perceptual-cognitive research. Hardware requirements and configuration, problems in developing software routines to handle reaction and stimulus timing using the TRS-80, and the development of a routine for…

Some 120 undergraduate students participated in experiments to learn how novice computer programers learn to interact with the computer. Two instructional booklets were used: A "rule" booklet consisted of definitions and examples of seven modified FORTRAN statements and appropriate grammar rules; the "model" booklet was…

A computer managed instruction (CMI) package to teach BASIC programming, together with questions to be answered in its evaluation, are described. The training package consists of 16 learning modules coupled; an interactive CMI system generates pretests and posttests for each module and branches students to the next appropriate module. It is…

This paper attempts to characterize some of the knowledge that people have of their language's semantic structure, in order to determine what a computer has to know to perform the operations of searching for facts and answering questions. Necessarily, this sort of semantic analysis is done in connection with syntactic structure. The meaningful…

When a grammar is expressed in augmented transition network (ATN) form, the problem of detecting syntactic ambuguity reduces to finding all possible paths through the ATNs. Each successfully terminating path through the ATN generates an acceptable parsing of the input string. Two ATN forms, minimal-node and pseudo-tree, are described along with…