A paper given at a conference on statistical computation discussed teaching statistics with computers. It concluded that computer-assisted instruction is most appropriately employed in the numerical demonstration of statistical concepts, and for statistical laboratory instruction. The student thus learns simultaneously about the use of computers…

Reports on a survey of universities in the United States which offer computer science graduate programs. Summarizes findings relating to the general attributes of responding universities, hardware and software resources, graduate student entry requirements, and courses of study. (TW)

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…

Persistent conceptual bugs exist in how novices, from primary school to college age, program and understand programs. These bugs are not specific to a given programming language but appear to be language-independent. The three different classes of bugs are: (1) parallelism, the assumption that different lines in a program can be active at the same…

Designed for use by computer programming teachers, this booklet presents the concepts of structured programming and provides examples of how to implement this methodology, which provides a systematic way of organizing programs so that even large and complex programs are easier to understand and modify than unstructured programs. After a brief…

This pilot study tested the hypothesis that the logical thinking skills of middle-grades students are enhanced by teaching them computer programming using the BASIC programming language. A quasi-experimental design was used with 36 students randomly selected and assigned to one of two treatment groups: 18 students received no instruction in…

To help the PLATO computer-based instruction system user achieve the most efficient storage and manipulation of data, this manual begins with a review of the structure of decimal, binary, and octal number systems, and methods for converting from one system to another. The text describes the four basic operations that PLATO employs to manipulate…

A general description is provided of the "geometric dictionary," a graphic display aid, used by the Computer-Assisted Instruction Laboratory at the Pennsylvania State University. The purpose of the description is to enable the reader to duplicate and use the dictionary on any cathode ray tube terminal of the IBM 1500 system. The major…

This handbook is for the student with little or no previous experience with computer utilization for data processing. Sample problems to be run on the computer are included. It gives: (1) an overview of the sequence of steps from obtaining data to receiving computer output, (2) a guide to common computer packages, (3) an illustration of the use of…

The need for a high level computer-assisted instructional (CAI) course authoring language is discussed and the capabilities of COURSEWRITER, BASIC, and APL for meeting this need are compared. The demand for such a language is first documented and some historical trends of CAI language development and use are reviewed. Following this, the…

A module designed to teach ninth grade students how to write simple machine language programs is offered in this newsletter of the University of Pittsburgh's Project Solo. The first few pages of the newsletter present a rationale for having ninth grade students learn programming, and some programs which were written by such students are presented.…

The terms in this glossary come from the fields of electronics, communications, systems analysis, mathematics, and computer science. When two or more terms have the same meaning, the preferred term is noted. Relationships between terms are shown by descriptive cross-referencing expressions (i.e., similar to, contrasted with, related to, clarified…

Revised material from earlier Project Solo newsletters is presented here. The revised material updates programs to explain the law of sines and cosines and to apply the idea of rectangular coordinates approach to aircraft navigation systems such as VORTAC. A brief discussion of the value of off-line as opposed to on-line activity is also…