Teaching a first course on data structures

We discuss our experience with integrating three key ideas of software engineering into our data structures course: formal specifications, information hiding, and bottom up programming. The idea of formal specifications is fostered by the introduction of a simple formal notation, which students use to describe their data structures and to validate their implementation. The idea of data abstraction is fostered by separating, in the very design of our course, the usage of data structures from their implementation. Finally the idea of bottom up programming is fostered by showing students how complex systems can be designed one layer at a time, where each layer refers exclusively to the layer immediately below it.