Overview:

TeachScheme, ReachJava! Project is a culmination of its two constituent parts: TeachScheme! and How to Design Classes (HtDC) --- presenting a comprehensive design-based curriculum for introduction to computing and programming.

The curriculum provides an integrated pedagogic and technical solution to teaching a disciplined program design that supports novice learners and challenges all students. It uses multiple programming languages over multiple semesters with a well-developed methodology for transitioning between languages. Students develop skills in iterative refinement through a series of extended exercises supported by Teachpacks (novice-sppropriate libraries) that encapsulate infrastructure code while allowing students to work in pedagogically-motivated language subsets. Each of these features is critical to creating a powerful yet novice-friendly introductory curriculum.

Students start programming in functional languages, and through the use of Teachpacks implement an interactive game within the first three weeks of the semester. By the end of the second semester they develop a solid understanding of the architecture of the Java Collections Framework including the design of algorithms that leverage the Collections interfaces for data structure access and the functional operations on the data set elements. Test-first design and strict documentation requirements enforce disciplined programming while illustrating in a concrete way the program's desired behavior.

Additional software supports unit testing in both Java and in Scheme-based languages, as well as the design of interactive games with graphics.