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Session 11b5 Session 11b5
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE
November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29
th
ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
11b5-9
Introducing High School Students to Event Driven Programming
1
R. Raymond Lang and Marguerite Saacks-Giguette
Computer Science Department
Xavier University of LA
New Orleans, LA 70125

1
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9522079.
Abstract
The SOAR 3 Program at Xavier University of
Louisiana is a summer bridge program for rising high
school seniors and recent high school graduates planning to
major in a computing discipline. The 4-week program offers
instruction in quantitative and verbal reasoning, problem
solving, and college vocabulary. The program features daily
laboratories that expose program participants to subject
material found in a typical college computer science
curriculum. The labs are organized into 4 sequences or
tracks: CS Software, CS Hardware, Math, and Physics.
Each track consists of four 3-hour modules. In the CS
Software track, we expose students to some of the basic
concepts and terminology pertaining to graphic user
interfaces and event-driven programming. Over the course
of the four CS Software modules, the students use
Asymetrix
®
Toolbook II Instructor to explore and gain
familiarity with the use of buttons, dialog boxes, and other
GUI components. Their experience is set in the context of
developing a simple GUI application that accumulates the
total distance of a trip as the user clicks cities on a map. The
application shows the trip as lines connecting the cities the
user has clicked on; it also contains undo and reset buttons.
In addition to their exposure to GUI components, the
participants also receive exposure to important computer
science concepts such as objects and their properties, events
and event handlers, selection and repetition structures,
stacks and their associated operations, and the use of a
development environment to create, test, and deploy an
application. In the paper, we will discuss the structure and
content of the modules in more detail. We will also discuss
what motivated us to develop this series of modules.
Introduction
To address the problem of small numbers of computer
science majors, the authors collaborated in the development
of a program to increase the number of computer science
majors. This program took the form of a summer bridge
program for rising high school seniors and graduates. The
program, SOAR 3, introduces the target group to computer
science and motivates them to choose computer science as a
major. It is funded by a grant awarded by the National
Science Foundations Minority Institutions Infrastructure
Program. In this paper, we give an overview of the program
and provide details about one aspect of the program in which
participants gain hands-on exposure to central computer
science software concepts.
History and Overview of the SOAR Programs
SOAR is an acronym for Stress on Analytical Reasoning.
The SOAR 3 program is an intense four-week program
featuring inductive reasoning laboratory exercises
emphasizing computer science concepts. We modeled
SOAR 3 very closely after SOAR 2, a bridge program for
students interested in engineering, physics, and mathematics.
SOAR 2, in turn, was modeled after the original SOAR
program, targeted to students planning to major in
biomedical and health sciences.
All the SOAR programs have had a major impact on
Xaviers participating departments. The original SOAR
Program has contributed to Xaviers becoming number one
in the placement of African Americans into medical school.
Since the inception of the SOAR 2 program in 1987,
enrollment in the Xavier Engineering program has more than
doubled. We have built on the past success of the previous
SOAR programs by developing a program specifically
tailored to students interested in majoring in a computing
discipline (computer science, computer engineering, or
computer information systems).
Rather than teach content explicitly, the SOAR
programs strive to improve problem solving ability.
Participating students attend 3-hour discovery labs designed
to exercise a students inductive reasoning and general
problem solving skills. Students also receive instruction
designed to strengthen the verbal and quantitative skills as
well as critical reading abilities required for understanding
textbooks, answering exam questions, and improving their
performance on standardized tests. Other components are
general vocabulary building and group competitions. All the
SOAR programs follow a similar pattern of group structure
and group leaders. Groups of between 15 and 20 SOAR 3 Session 11b5
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE
November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29
th
ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
11b5-10
participants are led by a successful Xavier computer science
major. The group leader remains with his/her group most of
the day. He/she helps administer the quizzes, helps conduct
some laboratories, eats lunch and dinner with the group,
conducts verbal and quantitative reasoning classes, conducts
vocabulary sessions, and helps supervise other activities.

[1]
The SOAR group structure serves several important
purposes. First, small groups enable each participant to
receive personal attention so that he or she can reach his or
her maximum potential. Second, the group structure
guarantees that each SOAR student will become acquainted
with a successful minority student from the discipline. The
group leader functions as a role model old enough to win the
participants respect, but young enough to identify with.
Third, since groups, not individuals, are recognized in group
competitions, the group competitions encourage the
participants to work together. Thus, they learn to develop a
peer support system based on academics, a skill that will
increase their chance of academic success in the future. [3]
The SOAR 3 Program
Participants in SOAR 3 study Computer Science Software,
Computer Science Hardware, Mathematics, and Physics.
Each subject track consists of four sessions. Each session is
led by two instructors with the group assisting. The
Mathematics and Physics sessions were developed for the
original SOAR Program [1]. Because SOAR 3 is geared for
students who express interest in a computing discipline, the
program introduced two new subject tracks of four modules
each: CS Software and CS Hardware. The CS Software
modules emphasize theoretical computer science concepts
and abstractions, while the CS Hardware modules illustrate
the physical implementation and organization of computers.
In keeping with the SOAR paradigm, all the modules
include activities requiring problem-solving, analytical
thinking, and/or synthesis of ideas.
Motivation for the CS Software Track
Our original design for the software track was four
independent laboratories focusing on software control
structures, basic algorithms (sorting and searching), graph
theory, and languages. After the first summer of the
program (1996), the algorithm module was eliminated and
the languages module was expanded to a two-part module
that we used for the summer 1997 edition of SOAR 3. In
preparing for the summer 1998 SOAR 3, we reflected on the
following informal observations:
Although most incoming freshmen computer science
majors had used GUI programs, they were unfamiliar
with the concepts of graphic controls and events.
More generally, many incoming majors had only a
vague idea at best of what computer science is about.
When asked why they chose to major in computer
science, many students would give a reply reflecting
that they enjoy using computers, but are not necessarily
interested in the inner workings of a computer, let alone
their theoretical underpinnings. Our observation is that
such students are at high risk to change majors once
they discover what computer science entails.
To remedy this situation, we wanted the SOAR 3
program to provide participants with exposure to the subject
matter of computer science so that they can make a more
informed decision when choosing to major in computer
science. Toward this end, for the summer 1998 SOAR 3, we
dedicated the entire software track to a single programming
project that would introduce participants to the following
concepts:
graphic controls, events, and event-driven
programming,
operation and use of an object-oriented development
environment,
selection and repetition structures,
stacks, and
user-interface design and application deployment.
Obviously, we do not expect that, over the c