Introducing high school students to event driven programming

The SOAR 3 Program at Xavier University of Louisiana, USA, is a summer bridge program for rising high school seniors and recent high school graduates planning to major in a computing discipline. The 4-week program offers instruction in quantitative and verbal reasoning, problem solving and college vocabulary. The program features daily laboratories that expose program participants to subject material found in a typical college computer science curriculum. In addition to their exposure to GUI components, the participants also receive exposure to important computer science concepts such as objects and their properties, events and event handlers, selection and repetition structures, stacks and their associated operations, and the use of a development environment to create, test, and deploy an application. In the paper, the authors discuss the structure and content of the modules in more detail. They also discuss what motivated them to develop this series of modules.