The inverted curriculum in practice

Teaching introductory programming today presents considerable challenges, which traditional techniques do not properly address. Students start with a wide variety of backgrounds and prior computing experience; to retain their attention it is useful to provide graphical interfaces at the level set by video games; and with the ever-increasing presence of computing in society the stakes are higher, requiring a computing curriculum to introduce students early to the issues of large systems. We address these challenges through an "outside-in" approach, or "inverted curriculum", which emphasizes the reuse of existing components in an example domain involving graphics and multimedia, a gentle introduction to formal reasoning thanks to Design by Contract techniques, and an object-oriented method throughout. The new course has now been taught twice, with considerable gathering of student data and feedback; we report on this experience and its continuation.