CMPSCI 187: Programming With Data Structures

David Mix Barrington

Fall, 2012

General Education Statement

CMPSCI 187 is an "R2" General Education course, fulfilling one of the graduation requirements for any bachelor's degree at UMass. (In practice, nearly all students in the course will have already filled this requirement with a mathematics course or with CMPSCI 121, but exceptions are possible.)

As part of the university's supervision of General Education, departments are required every five years to renew each course's gen-ed designation, explaining exactly how the course fulfills the goals set out for the designation by the General Education Council. As part of this review, I learned that instructors are required to address this question in their syllabus, explaining the learning goals for the course and how the gen-ed goals are being met.

Learning Goals for CMPSCI 187:

  1. Develop programming maturity in Java beyond that developed in CMPSCI 121, so that students are able to write and validate large programs with multiple classes.
  2. Learn about the specification, use, and implementation of important data structures such as stacks, queues, lists, search trees, and graphs.
  3. Begin the study of the mathematical analysis of algorithms, so that students may compare the worst-case asymptotic running times of different algorithms solving the same problem.

Overall General Education Goals:

The General Education Council has listed ten overall learning goals for General Education courses, four of which are primary for CMPSCI 187 and two of which are secondary:

Specific Goals for the R2 Designation:

The Council has also set out specific goals for the Analytic Reasoning courses within General Education, which CMPSCI 187 addresses as follows:

Last modified 10 September 2012