PSU’s approach for teaching Introductory Computer Science focuses on building a foundation of knowledge that allows students to select the appropriate methodology, syntax, and data structures depending on the situation. Students learn about writing efficient programs and how to make decisions about which programming methodology or data structure to select. Students use procedural abstraction, modular abstraction, data abstraction and object oriented programming in C++ in the CS162, CS163, and CS202 courses.

From the 16x courses students become equipped to deal with the management of external data files, external source files, arrays, strings, classes, pointers, and dynamic memory management. Students are taught about efficiency tradeoffs and have experienced the relationship between pointers, arrays, and pointer arithmetic.