Paradigms and laboratories in the core computer science curriculum: An overview

Recent issues of the bulletin of the ACM SIGCSE have been scrutinised to find evidence that the use of laboratory sessions and different programming paradigms improve learning difficult concepts and techniques, such as recursion and problemsolving. Many authors in the surveyed literature be- lieve that laboratories are effective because they offer a mode of learning that complements class- room teaching. Several authors believe that differ- ent paradigms are effective when used to support teaching mathematics (logic and discrete mathe- matics) and computer science (programming, com- parative programming languages and abstractma- chines). Precious little evidence by way of reported re- sults of surveys, interviews and exams was found in the ACM SIGCSE bulletins to support these be- liefs.