Modern software development concepts: a new philosophy for CS2

In this paper we propose a significantly different approach to CS2, the second course in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. Rather than a central focus on the design and implementation of data structures, we propose that the central focus be on modern software development concepts such as object-oriented design, exceptions, GUIs, graphics, collection classes, threads, and networking. We believe that these are the important concepts that students should be exposed to and should use in the second computer science course.