Historical use of case studies in AP CS

AP CS Course Description May 1992 / May 1993 — Case Studies (Optional)

A case study is
- a document that includes the statement of a problem,
- a program that solves the problem, and
- a written description of one expert’s path from problem statement to solution program. The write-up describes
  - the choices made for design and implementation, and
  - the justification for the choices that were made.
Case studies provide
- a vehicle for presenting the topics of the Advanced Placement Computer Science courses.
- examples of good style, the use of Pascal constructs, fundamental data structures, algorithms, and applications.
- an economical way to deal with large programs. Large programs especially
  - give the student practice in the management of complexity, and
  - motivate the use of certain programming practices including
    - thorough procedural decomposition,
    - intermodule communication through parameter passing, and
    - selection of data structures tailored to the needs of the problem.
Case studies are most valuable in teaching programming methodology. They
- allow the teacher to
  - show concretely the design and implementation decisions leading to the solutions of a problem, and thus
  - to focus more effectively on those aspects of the programming process.
- give the student
  - a model of the programming process.
  - a model program.
  - a context for seeing the importance of good design when a program is to be modified.
Case study questions in future AP Examinations might be concerned with activities such as these in context:
- modifying the procedural and data organization of a program to correspond to changes in the program specification
- evaluating alternatives in procedural and data organization
- evaluating alternative incremental development strategies
- understanding how the components of a large program fit together
- finding and fixing bugs in a realistic environment

created 7 March 2013
last revised 7 March 2013 next