Posts tagged ‘SIGCSE’
NSF TUES is Cancelled: Where will CS Ed funding come from?
The report on the requested NSF budget for 2014 has a pretty dramatic list of programs that have been cancelled as part of the administration’s desire to reorganize and “consolidate” federal STEM education programs.
CAUSE is an NSF-wide investment that incorporates funding from established programs in the EHR directorate and other NSF directorates funded though the Research and Related Activities (R&RA) account. It is created by consolidating three Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) programs: STEM Talent Expansion Program (STEP), Widening Implementation and Demonstration of Evidence- based Reforms (WIDER), and Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM (TUES); several R&RA programs: BIO’s Transforming Undergraduate Biology Education (TUBE); ENG’s Research in Engineering Education and Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education (NUE); GEO’s Geosciences Education and Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the Geosciences (OEDG); and the cross-NSF program, Climate Change Education (CCE).
TUES used to be the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program. TUES and CCLI have funded most of the federally-funded efforts presented at SIGCSE. Earlier, CE21 was cancelled, and its replacement isn’t announced.
An article in the latest Science magazine describes the new programs (and how surprised everyone in the STEM education community has been). K-12 belongs in the Department of Education (what does this mean for CS10K?), undergrad and grad in NSF, and informal ed in the Smithsonian (the Smithsonian?!?).
As far as I can tell, the NSF budget document is the only reference to the new NSF CAUSE (Catalyzing Advances in Undergraduate STEM Education). There is no solicitation, and no date for submitting proposals. Bottomline: the programs that have funded most of CS curriculum support are now gone, and the replacements do not yet exist. I hope that this all works out well, but it’s a little scary right now.
Congratulations to Eric Roberts on the 2012 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award!
Eric Roberts has been a truly outstanding educator for decades, starting as the first computer scientist at Wellesley College in 1980. He has personally taught thousands of computer scientists, and reached many more through his textbooks and curriculum development. His textbooks are exemplary; the first, Thinking Recursively, was named in a 1998 CACM survey article as one of the core texts that every computer science educator should know. He built an organization of professional lecturers at Stanford that has become a model for effective teaching of computer science at universities across the country.
Eric has shown exceptional leadership in computing education, made all the more effective because of the obvious priority he placed on being an outstanding educator. He devotes enormous time and energy to drawing attention to and addressing problems in our community, such as underrepresentation of women in computing and the need to devote more resources to computing education during times of enrollment surge. His principles and values have made him a respected voice in the computing education community.
Erics leadership is international in scope. He co-chaired the ACM Education Board for several years, and was one of the founding co-chairs of the ACM Education Council. From 1999 to 2005, he worked to develop a computing curriculum for public high schools in Bermuda. This program was the first national computing curriculum to be certified by an international standard board.
Erics work on Computing Curriculum 2001 exemplifies his leadership. He drew together diverse constituencies and stakeholders in a multi-year process. He was the principal author of the final report. The report is a significant intellectual achievement that has served educators around the world as they consider what every computing student needs to learn.
Slides from “The Revolution will be Televised” MOOCopalypse panel
The SIGCSE 2013 panel on “The Revolution will be Televised” on MOOCs and the impending MOOCopalypse was well attended and led to some great discussion. Our entire slide deck is available here.
My favorite part of the session was the response to my comments about access to MOOCs in Africa, i.e., that’s a motivating claim for many (“MOOCs provide learning opportunities to the developing world, like in Africa!”) while the reality is that there is very little access in Africa. We had two people in the audience then take the microphone and talk about their experiences in Tanzania and Sudan. The former department chair in Tanzania said that the MOOCs don’t contain the content yet that they need. The faculty member from Sudan said that only 50% of Sudan has access to the Internet. She said that the connected half doesn’t know that MOOCs exist.
My thanks to Mehran Sahami for organizing the panel, and to my fellow panelists Nick Parlante (eternal optimist about MOOCs) and Fred Martin (hero to the rebel forces battling the MOOCopalypse, for pushing his vision of MOOCs for flipped classrooms) for an engaging session!
Just in time for #SIGCSE13: Ironman draft of CS2013 is out!
Posted by Mehran Sahami. There are several sessions for feedback on the draft and to provide exemplars for the curriculum section.
Dear Colleagues,
Just in time for SIGCSE, we are happy to announce the availability of the
ACM/IEEE-CS Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) – Ironman v1.0 draft.
The draft is available at the CS2013 website (http://cs2013.org) or directly
at:
http://cs2013.org/ironman-draft/cs2013-ironman-v1.0.pdf
The Ironman v1.0 draft contains a revision of the CS2013 Body of Knowledge,
based on comments from the previously released CS2013 Strawman and Ironman
v0.8 drafts. The Ironman v1.0 draft also includes additional new chapters
as well as over 50 course exemplars, showing how the CS2013 Body of
Knowledge may be covered in a variety of actual fielded courses.
** SIGCSE-13 SPECIAL SESSION: CS2013: Reviewing the Ironman Report **
A special session, entitled “ACM/IEEE-CS Computer Science Curriculum 2013:
Reviewing the Ironman Report,” will be held at SIGCSE-13. This session will
give you an overview of the current state of the CS2013 curricular
guidelines and provide opportunities for discussion and feedback from the
community. The special session will be held on Thursday, March 7, 2013 from
10:45am to 12:00pm in Ballroom E.
** SIGCSE-13 SPECIAL SESSION: CS2013 EXEMPLAR-FEST **
Another SIGCSE-13 special session is the “CS 2013: Exemplar-Fest”. This
session will showcase submitted samples of CS2013 course/curriculum
exemplars and provide the opportunity to engage the community in the
development of additional course/curricular exemplars for CS2013. The
special session will be held on Friday, March 8, 2013 from 10:45am to
12:00pm in Ballroom F.
COMMENTING ON CS2013 IRONMAN v1.0 DRAFT
The Ironman v1.0 draft is the penultimate draft of the CS2013 curricular
guidelines. The final version of the CS2013 guidelines will be published in
Fall 2013. We welcome additional comments on the CS2013 Ironman draft from
the computing community. Information on how to comment on the draft is
available at the CS2013 website. Comments on the Ironman draft will be
addressed in the final released version of CS2013.
CALL FOR EXEMPLARS
The CS2013 Curriculum Steering Committee is continuing to seek exemplars of
courses and curricula from the broader community. This open process will
better connect the CS2013 Body of Knowledge to real, existing approaches
representing diverse and innovative ways to teach computer science. In
Computer Science terms, the topics and learning outcomes in the Body of
Knowledge represent a “specification”, whereas a curriculum is an
“implementation” and a course is part of a curriculum. Information on how
to contribute course/curriculum exemplars is available at the CS2013 website
(http://cs2013.org) or directly at:
http://cs2013.org/exemplars.html
Warm regards,
Mehran Sahami and Steve Roach
Co-Chairs, CS2013 Steering Committee
CS2013 Steering Committee
ACM Delegation
Mehran Sahami, Chair (Stanford University)
Andrea Danyluk (Williams College)
Sally Fincher (University of Kent)
Kathleen Fisher (Tufts University)
Dan Grossman (University of Washington)
Beth Hawthorne (Union County College)
Randy Katz (UC Berkeley)
Rich LeBlanc (Seattle University)
Dave Reed (Creighton University)
IEEE-CS Delegation
Steve Roach, Chair (Univ. of Texas, El Paso)
Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas (Univ. Catolica San Pablo, Peru)
Ronald Dodge (US Military Academy)
Robert France (Colorado State University)
Amruth Kumar (Ramapo Coll. of New Jersey)
Brian Robinson (ABB Corporation)
Remzi Seker (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Univ.)
Alfred Thompson (Microsoft)
############################
Where to find Guzdial at SIGCSE Symposium 2013
I’ve already written a couple of SIGCSE Symposium 2013 preview posts (on the Dorn and Elliott Tew paper, and on the UCSD set of papers on Peer Instruction). Here in my last preview post, I’ll give you a sense for what I’ll be up to. I fly out to Denver Tuesday 5 March in the evening.
- Wednesday (6 March 2013), I’ll be at the SIGCSE Board Meeting all day. If I figured it right, this is my last face-to-face Board meeting — I’ve decided not to run again and I think that the new Board starts this Fall.
- Thursday, I have no presentations, but I have the day pretty much booked meeting with people who are also going to be at SIGCSE. Should be fun!
- Friday is over-booked.
- At 10:45 in Governors 12, Betsy DiSalvo is presenting her paper on Glitch (that I’m a co-author on), “Workifying Games.”
- We’re having an ECEP lunch for advisors and Experts Bureau members at noon. (I didn’t realize until this weekend that there’s a plenary on Friday at lunchtime — that’s never happened before that I can recall at the SIGCSE Symposium.)
- At 1:45 in Ballroom E, I’m on the “Passion, Beauty, Joy, and Awe” panel — I’ve decided to try to do a live coding with sound demo, which should be exciting and (maybe) fun and (maybe) disastrous.
- At 3:45 in Ballroom E, I’m on the Panel on MOOCs, “The Revolution will Be Televised: Perspectives on Massive Open Online Education,” with both proponents and critics. (Guess which role I’ll be playing.)
- I’m having a dinner with student volunteers at 5 pm, then hoping to find Michael Köllig to congratulate him on his Outstanding Contribution to CS Education award.
- Saturday is literally double-booked.
- At 9 am, I’m presenting in the “Nifty Assignments” special session in Ballroom E, AND I’m a discussant in Ballroom F on the “Expanding access to K-12 Computer Science Education: Research on the Landscape of CS Professional Development.” I’m thrilled to be on “Nifty” for the first time, but which I could stay for both. I think I’m going to speak first at “Nifty,” then run next door to be on the “Landscape” panel.
- At 3 pm, we start the ACM Education Council meeting (after Jane Margolis’s lunchtime plenary talk).
- Sunday, I’ll be at the ACM Education Council meeting all day, then fly home at 5, getting home at 10 pm. Monday is our PhD recruiting day and teaching, so not much recovery and decompression time.
(If I miss some days of the blog in here, I hope you’ll understand.)
SIGCSE 2013 Preview: Measuring attitudes in introductory computing
Brian Dorn and Allison Elliott Tew have been working on a new assessment instrument for measuring attitudes towards computing. They published a paper at ICER 2012 on its development, and the new SIGCSE 2013 paper is on its initial uses.
In general, we have too few research measures in computing education research. Allison’s dissertation work stands alone as the only validated language-independent measure of CS1. Brian and Allison have been following a careful process of developing the Computing Attitudes Survey (CAS). They’re developing their instrument based on a measure created for Physics. The Physics instrument has already been adapted for Chemistry and Biology, so the process of adaptation is well-defined.
What’s particularly cool about CAS is that it can be used as a pre-test/post-test. What were the attitude effects of a particular intervention? The SIGCSE 2013 paper describes use of CAS in a set of pre-test/post-test situations.
Here comes the remarkable part. In the other fields, an introductory course actually leads to decreased interest in the field (more specifically, in attitudes less-like experts in the field). But not in computer science! The CAS indicates increased interest in the field after the first course.
Why is that? I like the hypothesis that Brian and Allison suggest. Students have some clue what physics, biology, and chemistry — but it’s probably significantly wrong about real practice, and real practice is more rigorous than they thought. Students have almost no clue what computer science is. They probably have misconceptions, but they are not tightly held — we’ve found that high school students’ perceptions of what CS is can be changed pretty easily. After a first CS course, students realize that it’s more interesting than they thought, so attitudes become more expert-like and positive.
A new resource for CS teachers doing Peer Instruction
I’m a fan of Peer Instruction. I’m sharing this announcement that Beth Simon just made on the SIGCSE mailing list about a new resource for CS teachers who want to use Peer Instruction:
This website serves to support computing instructors implementing Peer
Instruction — a very specifically designed pedagogy developed by
Harvard physicist Eric Mazur (read more under “About”). In findings
to be presented at SIGCSE 2013, we report on Peer Instruction’s impact
in reducing class fail rates by more than half and present results
from a quasi-experimental study where students in a course adopting
Peer Instruction scored 5.7% better on the final exam than a control
section using standard lecture approaches.
We hope you might find these resources helpful and discuss them with
your colleagues. In particular: If you are interested in participating in an e-support
program for faculty adopting PI, we encourage you to sign up on our
web site. Not only can you get feedback from experienced PI
instructors, but you can also share things that worked with others and
complain about things that didn’t work!
The Best CS Summer Camp Paper: Sustainable, Effective, and Replicable
I’ve got a lot out of SIGCSE 2012, and I have several posts that I’d like to share. But I became ill on the last day of the conference, and am just now recovering.
I really do mean what I wrote in the title. I am, of course, biased towards the paper by my wife, Barbara Ericson, and our external evaluator on Georgia Computes, Tom McKlin, but I still think that this is the best paper on computing summer camps yet published at SIGCSE.
There are lots of people creating computing summer camps these days, and for good reason. They really can work for increasing student interest and providing some real education about computer science, which is missing from most U.S. schools. What makes Barb’s summer camp program so good that it really works on several levels:
- First, it is effective. They have reliable measures that students improve their attitudes about computing in pre/post comparisons. Women and members of under-represented groups in particular improve their attitudes about further study in computing. But even better: The students learn something about computer science. Barb and Tom have measures of learning about computer science and programming that indicate that the students in the summer camps are learning, too.
- Second, they are sustainable. Barb has created a business plan that makes these camps work continuously after only a $5K seed grant. Barb has been doing this for a long time, and she’s figured out several rules of thumb. For example, don’t have University faculty teach your camps. Faculty are too expensive, and high school teachers need and want the summer work — and it gives them the chance to learn something new to take into their classroom. Another example: Always offer both high school and middle school camps. High school camps give you the best chance to recruit undergrads into your program, but middle school camps can charge more (since the kids are too young to stay at home) and help cover the cost of the high school camp.
- Third, they are replicable. Through Georgia Computes, Barb has now given seed grants to start 11 more camps around Georgia. Some of these have been running for several years now. Better yet — they’re effective, too. The paper shows that the seed grant camps are returning results comparable to Barb’s original camps.
One of the things that I like best about Barb’s camps (besides the fact that they work) is that they benefit multiple levels of the computing education pathway. Barb offers workshops on “How to Run a Summer Camp” to higher-education faculty in Georgia, on logistics, curricula, and business plans. The faculty can apply for seed grants, keeping them involved. To get a seed grant, they have to show that they will have a sustainable business plan, that they will gather data for the evaluation effort, and that they will do something useful during the academic year with any robots or other kits that they purchase with the seed funds. We encourage faculty to set up “Lending Libraries” where the robots are made available to local teachers to use in their classes. The faculty then hire high school teachers, which gives them a chance to learn something new. Finally, the students get the camps.
It’s the combination of sustainable, effective, and replicable that really makes this a striking result. Summer camps can really work, and here’s a good paper on how. Sure, summer camps could be done even better, but I think that Barb has the current state-of-the-art.
SIGCSE, Keynote #1, Fred Brooks. (Yes, THAT Fred Brooks.) « Nick Falkner
Nick is doing an amazing job with play-by-play blog posts of SIGCSE 2012 — I recommend reading there for what’s going on!
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr is a pretty well-know figure in Computer Science. Even if you only vaguely heard of one of his most famous books “The Mythical Man Month“, you’ll know that his impact on how we think about projects, and software engineering projects in general, is significant and he’s been having this impact for several decades. He’s spent a lot of time trying to get student Software Engineering projects into a useful and effective teaching form – but don’t turn off because you think this is only about ICT. There’s a lot for everyone in what follows.
His keynote on Thursday morning was on “The Teacher’s Job is to Design Learning Experiences; not Primarily to Impart Information” and he covered a range of topics, including some general principles and a lot of exemplars. He raised the old question: why do we still lecture? He started from a discussion of teaching before printing, following the development of the printed word and into the modern big availability, teleprocessed world of today.
via SIGCSE, Keynote #1, Fred Brooks. (Yes, THAT Fred Brooks.) « Nick Falkner.
SIGCSE 2012 is this week in Raleigh!
About 1200 of us will be gathering in Raleigh this week for the ACM SIGCSE 2012 Symposium, March 1-3. (All day SIGCSE Board meeting is Feb 29, so I leave Tuesday night.) Some of the highlights of this week’s conference include:
- The opening keynote on Thursday will be Fred Books (“Mythical Man Month” which I had to read for more than one class at U.Michigan) on “The teacher’s job is to design learning experiences, not primarily to impart information.”
- Jane Prey will accept the 2012 Lifetime Service award and will speak at the First Timer’s lunch on Wednesday.
- Friday’s keynote will come from the 2012 ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contributions awardee, Hal Abelson (think about SICP, MIT Open Courseware, “Blown to Bits,” and App Inventor).
- UPE will present their annual award to Alan Kay at a noontime meeting on Friday. (I hope they booked a large enough room — this is going to be a popular meeting!)
- Saturday lunch will include a talk from Google’s “Big Picture” visualization group.
It’s going to be a fun week — I do hope you can join us!
SIGCSE 2012 continues our long tradition of bringing together colleagues from around the world to present papers, panels, posters, special sessions, and workshops, and to discuss computer science education in birds-of-a-feather sessions and informal settings. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium addresses problems common among educators working to develop, implement and/or evaluate computing programs, curricula, and courses. The symposium provides a forum for sharing new ideas for syllabi, laboratories, and other elements of teaching and pedagogy, at all levels of instruction.
Our three-sided conference theme, “Teaching, Learning, and Collaborating,” commemorates North Carolina’s renowned “Research Triangle” where SIGCSE 2012 will be held. Teaching, learning, and collaborating occur inside and outside of the classroom, among various combinations of students, academics, industry professionals, and others.
via SIGCSE 2012 – Home.
New PCAST report talks about SIGCSE
Pretty cool! The latest PCAST (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) report is on “ENGAGE TO EXCEL: PRODUCING ONE MILLION ADDITIONAL COLLEGE GRADUATES WITH DEGREES IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND MATHEMATICS.” CS Education plays a significant role in this, and SIGCSE gets a few mentions!
Heading to International Computing Education Research 2011 in Rhode Island: How CS students choose Threads
I’m heading out Sunday for the 2011 International Computing Education Research (ICER) Workshop, hosted by Dr. Kate Sanders at Rhode Island College in Providence. The schedule is exciting — we have a bunch of speakers from communities who have been doing CS Ed research, but have not been at ICER previously. (“Workshop” is ACM’s name for a small conference.) I’m chairing the discussion papers session. I’m looking forward to Eric Mazur’s keynote (who has a new educational technology that he’s promoting), and his advice from the Physics Education Research community to the much-younger Computing Education Research community.
The second talk of the conference is from my PhD student, Mike Hewner (same student who previously studied what game developers look for in graduates). Mike’s dissertation research is asking, “How do computer science undergraduates define ’computer science,’ and how does their definition influence their educational decisions?” He’s using grounded theory, which is a demanding social science method. He’s done about a dozen interviews so-far, and has not yet reached “saturation” (where new interviews don’t contribute to the developing theory), so the current theory is still considered “tentative.” This paper is one piece of that work.
In most CS degree programs, there are some options for students: Choices between electives, between specialization paths, between Threads. Mike wanted to know how students made those choices. Several findings surprised me. First, students don’t ”begin with the end in mind.” Students he interviewed had little idea what job they wanted, and if they did, they didn’t really know what the job entailed. Second, students don’t think that the choice of specialization is all that important — they figure that they’re at a good school, they trust the faculty, so whatever choice they make will turn out fine. Finally, an engaging, fun class can dramatically influence students’ perception of a field. A “fun” theory class can convince students that they like theory. Their opinion of the subject is easily swayed by the qualities of the class and the teacher. “Why are you in robotics (even though it doesn’t have much to do with what you say you want to do for your job)?” “Well, I really liked the robots we used in CS101…”
Hope to see some of you there!
Trip report on ITICSE 2011: Robots for girls, WeScheme, and student bugs in Scratch.
ITICSE 2011 was a fun, interesting event in Darmstadt, Germany last week. Here’s a brief report on my experience of ITICSE, completely biased and centered on the events that I attended, and only highlighting a handful of papers.
Ulrik Schroeder’s opening keynote (slides available) focused on the outreach activities from his group at Aachen University, with some high-quality evaluation. The most interesting insight for me was on their work with Lego Robotics. I raised the issue that, in our GaComputes work, we find that girls get more excited about computing and change their attitudes with other robots (like Pico Crickets or Pleo Dinosaurs) more than Lego Robotics. Ulrik agreed and said that they found the same thing. But boys still like and value being good at Lego Robotics, and that’s important for their goals. He wants to find and encourage the girls who do well at the same robots that the boys like. He wants the girls to recognize that they are good at the same CS that the boys do. It’s a different goal than ours — we’re more about changing girls’ view of CS, and they’re more about finding and encouraging girls who will succeed at the existing definition of CS.
I went to a paper session on A Tool to Support the Web Accessibility Evaluation Process for Novices. They had a checklist and rubric, including role playing (what would an older user do with this site? A sight-impaired user? Someone whose native language isn’t English?) to use in evaluating the accessibility of a website. I liked the tool and was wondering where the same model could be used elsewhere. I got to thinking during this talk: Could we do a similar tool to support the design of curriculum that encourages diversity? Could we provide checklists, rubrics, and role plays (How would a female CS student respond to this homework write-up?) to help faculty be more sensitized to diversity issues?
The coolest technology I saw was WeScheme – they’ve built a Scheme-to-JavaScript compiler into a Web page, so that students can hack Scheme live from within the browser. I was less impressed by the paper presentation. They’re using WeScheme in a middle school, where the kids are doing code reviews (“which most undergraduate programs in the US don’t do”) and presenting their work to “programmers from Facebook and Google.” Somebody asked during Q&A, “How do you know that most undergraduate programs don’t do code reviews?” They had no evidence, just an informed opinion. I’m worried that the paper as a model for outreach. Are Facebook and Google programmers willing to visit all middle schools in the US? If not, this doesn’t scale. Nonetheless, the technology is amazing, and I expect that this is the future of programming in US schools.
Probably the paper that most influenced my thinking was Orni Meerbaum-Salant’s paper on Habits of Programming in Scratch (same session). They studied a bunch of students’ work in Scratch, and identified a number of common misconceptions and errors. What was fascinating was that the bugs looked (to me) a lot like the ones that Elliot Soloway found with the Rainfall Problem, and the issues with concurrency were like the ones that Mitchel Resnick found with Multilogo and that John Pane found with HANDS. That suggests that changing the environment doesn’t change the kinds of errors students are making. And since all student programming misconceptions come from our instruction (i.e., students don’t know much about programming before we teach them programming), it means that we’ve been teaching programming in basically (from a cognitive perspective) the same way since Pascal.
The paper reporting on a multi-year professional development effort in Alice was really interesting. They had lots of great stories and lessons learned. The most amazing story for me was the school district where, not only were the CD/DVD players disabled, but the IT staff had used glue guns to fill in the USB ports on the school computers. The IT administration wanted there to be no way for teachers to load new software onto those computers. How depressing and frustrating!
All the papers in the session on Facilitating Programming Instruction were thought provoking. Paul Denny’s project measures how much thrash and confusion that students face in figuring out Java — and there’s a lot of it. Shuhaida Mohamed Shuhidan (“Dina”)’s dissertation work is yet another example of how little students understand about even programs as simple as “Hello, World!” I really liked that Matt Bower is exploring how learning a second language can influence/interfere with the first language learned, but I was disappointed that they only used self-report to measure the influence/interference. Without any kind of prompt (e.g., an example program in the first language), can you really tell what you’ve forgotten about a first language?
My keynote went well, I thought (slides available). I talked about CS for non-majors, for professionals who discover CS late in life, and for high school students and teachers. After lunch the third day, I headed off to Aachen University to visit with Ulrik’s group, so I didn’t get to see more. IITICSE was a lot of fun and gave me lots of good ideas to think about.
MediaComp goes Nifty
One of the most popular sessions every year at the SIGCSE Symposium is “Nifty Assignments.” Faculty choose their coolest assignments and package them up with directions and examples. These are submitted to Stanford lecturer Nick Parlante, who selects the best and maintains his carefully curated Nifty website. Nobody wants to be scheduled opposite the Nifty session because all other sessions are nearly empty — the Nifty room is always SRO.
We did submit some Media Computation assignments early on, but they were rejected. Criteria for a good Nifty assignment include that it be easily taught by others, that the technologies and pedagogies used were widespread, and that the assignment could be picked up by just about anybody. The argument was that MediaComp just wasn’t that common back then.
That was then. This year, Nick Parlante the Curator selected a Media Computation assignment submitted by Nick Parlante the Lecturer! There’s another Nifty Assignment this year, from David Malan of Harvard, which does Media Computation in simple C by manipulating BMP’s, so no additional libraries required. Nick’s assignment is based on the new CS101 that he’s teaching at Stanford. His class (and the assignment) are based in JavaScript, and he’s created some cool examples at http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs101/cs101-demo.html. Particularly interesting: Because it’s HTML 5.0 and JavaScript, that page works just fine on the iPad, too.
It’s a great sign for us that MediaComp has gone mainstream, when a MediaComp project is “Nifty.”
SIGCSE Board: CS programs being canned or downgraded
Renee McCauley, SIGCSE Board Chair, is keeping a list of the CS programs being phased out in the US.
- University of Cincinnati, no new majors starting in Fall 2012.
- Fort Lewis College, CS major being terminated, announced December 2010
- SUNY, Geneseo, CS major no longer registering majors, announced Novemer 2010
- Berry College, downgrade of major to minor, announced November 2010
- Albion College, CS major terminated, announced May 2010
via SIGCSE Board 2010-2013: CS programs being canned or downgraded.
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