Work in Progress: A Test-First Approach to Teaching CS1

Test-driven development is a design strategy where a set of tests over a class is defined prior to the implementation of that class. The goal is to use the tests to exercise the class being developed, to provide immediate feedback of the overall quality of the code, and to identify and correct bugs as they are written. This paper presents a method to teaching CS1 using a "test-first" approach that will be tried in fall 2006. The test-first approach requires students to think about the problem, identify corner cases, analyze ways their code may fail, and evaluate their design. Further, a proposed evaluation is presented for determining the success of the approach