Teaching the abstract data type in CS2

Abstract

Teaching the abstract data type in CS2 is made difficult by the fact that the topic is intertwined with issues of language support, dynamic data structures and implementation techniques for dynamic data structures. When we switched to Ada to teach CS2, details of the language support for data abstraction caused us to restructure the CS2 course. By pushing the topic of the abstract data type toward the beginning of the course, we have found that it is covered more successfully.