In search of the inverse curriculum

Abstract

It has been argued that a better approach to the initial teaching of programming within software engineering is to start with reuse as the basic concept and take a 'Lego' view of software. Under such a scheme, the first exercises students attempt involve plugging together pre-existing black-box components to construct relatively sophisticated applications, only later moving on to look inside and study the internal details of the components themselves. The final stage is reached when students begin to construct their own pluggable components. This paper reports on an attempt to implement such an 'inverse curriculum' as part of the programming stream of a first-year introductory software engineering subject.