Un-muddling Implementation from Design via Algorithmic Design Patterns

This work in progress paper presents an abstraction of problems to introduce more advanced algorithmic constructs early in the computers science sequence in a natural way. The approach is to use an abstract class that extracts the methods common to many classes of algorithms for a given problem. For example, an abstract class for divide-and-conquer algorithms may be defined first, before a specific type of sorting algorithm is defined. This refocuses the coverage onto approaches to construct algorithms for a given problem, rather than the implementation of simple existent algorithms - a top down approach starting from the class of problem.