I attended the Mid-Southeastern Regional ACM Conference in Gatlinburg on 11/12/2010. The following are notes on the sessions I found most interesting along with a summary of the best ideas I heard:
An Investigation of the CS0 Boot Camp Technique on CS1 Student Performance
H. Erin Rickard, Coastal Carolina University
Erin Rickland described an experiment at Coastal Carolina University involving their CS0 (Introduction to Information Technology) course. Their CS0 course is open to all majors, but CS majors also enrolled in a “boot camp” lab that involved intensive, repetitive programming exercises in Python. The boot camp was composed of 20 75-minute labs in which students were required to complete 350 short programming “drill exercises.”
The results of this experiment were mixed as boot camp students entering CS1 (first programming class using C) did only marginally better than those that did not attend the boot camp. The boot camp did seem to help with retention and grades in the CS0 course, however.
Coastal Carolina has also moved from Java back to C during Fall 2009. They found that students were having problems using Java and that going back to C helped their success rates. They plan to continue to experiment with the “boot camp” idea, perhaps trying placement exams or allowing students to test out of some of the modules.
An Applet Package for CS0
William H. Hooper and Joyce Blair Crowell, Belmont University
Joyce Crowell and William Hooper discussed the use of a custom applet development package (called CHApplet) that they developed for use in the CS0 course at Belmont University. They described the CS0 course at Belmont (as with most schools) as serving the following functions:
- A “hook” to draw students to the CS major.
- To help prepare CS students for the CS1 (programming) course.
- A “filter” to help determine the aptitude of students for CS material.
- At Belmont, CS0 also counts as a Gen Ed Math requirement.
Belmont’s CS0 course consists of 15 tutorials on applets along with readings that attempt to convey the breadth of the computer science field. Initial exercises teach concepts by allowing students to complete partially written applets. Later exercises allow the students to create applets of their own design using the concepts that they have learned in the tutorials.
William Hooper pointed out that students enjoy creating applets since they allow students to do graphics and to easily share their work over the web for others to see. Their custom CHApplet package provides front end methods to facilitate the use of Java Swing along with helper apps for using various types of media. Belmont uses BlueJ for both their CS0 and CS1 courses.
Real-time Community Building with the Twitter API
Semmy Purewal, Georgia Gwinnett College
Semmy Purewal described several experiments he has conducted involving interactive social media along with a social media toolkit he has developed.
The first experiment involved the use of interactive social media at a “Pecha Kucha Night.” Pecha Kucha is a Japanese presentation methodology in which presenters are allowed to show 20 slides but are restricted to spending only 20 seconds on each slide. Semmy organized a Pecha Kucha Night at which he also projected a live feed beside the presenter of email messages being sent from the audience about the presentation using a Macintosh RSS feed screen saver.
Semmy described this first attempt as something of a disappointment, but he repeated the experiment using Twitter (and hash tags) and had a huge success. He said that it created a very interesting dynamic between the audience and the presenter.
Next, Semmy allowed students to use Twitter and Flicker to update a display that was used by the CS department to tell students about events on campus. He felt that this experiment helped to build community between faculty and staff as both were working together to keep everyone informed and entertained with text and pictures.
Semmy also organized an interactive social media event at “Accepted Students Day” at the College of Charleston. This is a day in which students who have been accepted to college, but haven’t decided if they are going to go to school there or not, come to campus to check out the place and talk to faculty to help them to make up there minds. Semmy connected a live Twitter feed to the JumboTron in the stadium. He said that this event was wildly popular.
Semmy is currently working to connect a Twitter/Flicker feed to the monitors around the campus at Georgia Gwinnett College. Students will have to register to allow them to participate so that messages appearing on the screens can be tied back to the person sending them.
To facilitate this project and to help others do similar experiments, Semmy developed a JavaScript-based toolkit (called Spotter). Spotter makes it easy to incorporate live feeds from Twitter, Facebook and Flicker (and others) on a web page.
From LEGO Robotics Summer Camp Projects to CS1 KAREL Assignments
Cen Li, Middle Tennessee State University
Cen Li organized a week-long summer Lego Robotics Camp for grades 9-12 using an NSF Partnerships for Innovation grant for recruiting of area high-school students and to improve CS retention. The Robotics Camp was one of three summer camps, the others being Alice Programming and Multimedia Programming using Python.
The Robot Camp used the Mindstorm and RobotC curriculums in conjunction with the “Robotics Explorations” book. Cen described several of the exercises and also discussed ways that she would likelychange the camp when they host it again. These changes included better pairing of hardware and software team members and the encouragement of early finishing students to assist the other students. She also mentioned the use of KAREL, a robot simulation environment.
Cen felt that the camp would help students to grasp object-oriented concepts that they will encounter in MTSUs C++-based CS1 course.
Interesting Ideas from the conference:
- Semmy Purewal’s use of interactive social media for college community building.
- Coastal Carolina moving back from Java to C to improve retention and student success.
- The use of the Mindstorms and RobotC curriculums for teaching robotics and the KAREL environment as a potential for robot-based distance learning.
- Belmont University counting CS0 for Gen Ed Math credit.
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