Component-Based Software Engineering: Providing Intellectual Focus to CS1/CS2
                              Bruce W. Weide
                       The Ohio State University
                  http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~weide

First-year computer science students should see that computer science as a
discipline has an important intellectual role to play in the academy and
that it offers deep philosophical questions, much like the other hard
sciences and mathematics; that CS is not "just programming".  The good news
is that CS1/CS2 can illustrate rich and foundational intellectual themes
even while emphasizing utilitarian principles and practices of software
engineering.  Pieces of such themes run through many current efforts in
CS1/CS2.  The challenge is to emphasize these themes, to integrate and
structure the content of CS1/CS2 around them, and to make students
explicitly aware of them.  In this way, the introductory CS sequence can be
intellectually well-founded, for all to see.

An appropriate intellectual focus for CS1/CS2 can be built on the
foundations of systems thinking and mathematical modeling, as these
principles are manifested in a component-based software paradigm. We outline
some of the main technical and pedagogical features of this approach to
CS1/CS2, and report on our experience with it.