I attended the 2009 Mid-Southeastern ACM Conference on Nov 13, 2009 in Gatlinburg, TN. I’ve attended (and presented at) this conference for the last four years. I think it gets better every year. ETSU and UT-Chattanooga were well represented by students and faculty. I’ve included a summary below of the best presentations I saw (including the one I gave):

Are You an EduPunk?
 David Brown, Pellissippi State Community College

Abstract
Taking inspiration from the Punk movement, EduPunks are educators rebelling against the corporate, cookie-cutter educational system in favor of new and progressive learning strategies. EduPunks seek to overturn the established order by discovering for themselves what works in the classroom. Eschewing traditional techniques, they seek inspiration from games and popular media in order to create radically new kinds of educational environments.

Summary
I showed an 8-page comic book that illustrated many of the “alternative learning strategies” that I have tried in CSIT1110. The presentation appeared to be well received.

Tech-related Coommunity Outreach – Experiences and Opportunities
 Semmy Purewal, University of Tennessee – Chattanooga

Semmy presented some of the community service work that he has begun to incorporate into the CS program at UT Chattanooga. He started “Free IT Athens” as a non-profit computer recycling program utilizing CS students as volunteers to refurbish donated computers. They sold the refurbished computers to the community for $25. Outside volunteers could earn a new computer with a few hours of work. They have processed over 1000 computers. So far, this program is voluntary and not for credit. He also mentioned some similar efforts  www.freelinuxpc.org, www.hfoss.org, www.laptop.org).

I would like to invite Semmy to come to PSCC and tell us about the program he set up in Chattanooga. This is a potential interdisciplinary “Green-IT” community service project.

Visual Logic with Java
 Kathy Winters, University of Tennessee – Chattanooga

Kathy is using “Visual Logic” (Course Technology software) in her introductory Java class. Visual Logic allows you to easily draw flowcharts and then “execute” them to see the output that the algorithm will produce. She uses a book that has 4 chapters of Visual Logic followed by 7 chapters of Java that utilize the same algorithms as have been flowcharted, but coded in Java.

I was highly impressed with the flowcharting tool. The only drawback I found was that Kathy said that she didn’t think that you could do functions in Visual Logic. This is a tool that we might ought to look at either for CSIT1110 or CSIT1510 or both.

Computational Science from the Undergraduate Classroom to Internships
 Angela Shiflet, Wofford College
 Angela described the Computational Science program at Wofford which is basically like a minor in CS, but is geared toward science students. Classes include programming, data structures, data modeling and simulation and web/database. Students learn about using computers in their discipline as in genome sequencing, climate modeling, genetic computation, oceanic modeling, heat diffusion, plant growth, spread of disease, predator/prey models, etc. The program has been very successful in helping place students after graduation. It has also brought a greater number of women into their CS classes. She reported that one-half of the Computational Science students are female.

This program made me think of the possibility of creating a Computational Science certificate at PSCC that might be attractive to science students.

Assembly on the PlayStation 3
 William H. Hooper, Belmont University

William described his assembly language course that utilized a Sony Playstation 3 (PowerPC 970 processor) running Linux. I was very excited by the idea of using a PS/3 until he said that you couldn’t access the GPU from Linux (no graphics). He did show some cool examples including calling assembly routines from C and his session was packed with students.