A structured laboratory component for the introductory programming course

This paper presents the author’s experience with using a structured laboratory to accompany a CS 1 course. A weekly 3-hour supervised lab period was used to help teach such topics as debugging techniques, program testing and commenting, stubs and drivers, structure charts, abstract data types, operator precedence, parameters, round-off errors, data files, and some of the details of certain Pascal constructs. Some labs turned out very successful; a few others were not. We will describe our successes (and failures), along with ideas for future labs and some related work at other colleges. Introduction and Course