Schedule (Summer 2011)

We will start on Monday June 20 at 1:00pm. Registration and boxed lunches will be available starting at noon.

Description of Sessions

Monday June 20^th, 2011
12:00 PM	Registration and boxed lunches available for participants
1:00 PM	Welcome Message, Dr. Barbara Ryder, Professor and Department Head, DCS@VT Logistics for the workshop: transportation, dinner, hotel, etc.
1:30 PM	Computational Thinking, Dr. Dennis Kafura, Dr. Deborah Tatar An experimental course in "computational thinking for computer science" (CT4CS) was offered in Spring 2010. The purposes of this session are: (1) to illustrate the philosophy of the course by engaging the participating teachers in one of the hands-on physical simulations used in the class, and (2) to obtain feedback and critical commentary on the potential appropriateness of the course topics and materials for use in high schools or middle schools. The CT4CS course had as its goal the development of knowledge, intuition, and vocabulary related to fundamental computing concepts that students majoring in computer science would encounter at several points in the BS curriuculum. While using a varieity of physical or role-playing simulations and focused computer-based tools the course neither required experience with nor taught a programming language. The course engaged students in such topics as state and behavior, abstraction, relationships, concurrency, data structures, testing, and debugging. This session is organized by Dennis Kafura, whose teaching interests are in systems and software and who taught the first course in CT4CS, and Deborah Tatar, whose interests are in human-computer interaction and education.
3:30 PM	Afternoon Break
4:00 PM	Discussion of the use of computational thinking activities in your classrooms
5:00 PM	Adjourn
6:00 PM	The Dinner will take place at the Department of Computer Science Building at Virginia Tech. The building, Knowledge Works II, is located in the Corporate Research Center. The dinner will take place in the conference room in the first floor (KWII 1110). There is ample parking in front of the KWII building and it doesn’t require the VT Parking Permit.
Tuesday June 21^st, 2011
6:30 AM - 8:30 AM	Breakfast at the Hotel
9:00 AM	Graphical User Interfaces with the ACM JTF Classes, Dr. Stephen Edwards This session will provide a brief tutorial on building Graphical User Interfaces using the ACM JTF library. The JTF consists of Java classes (and packages) to support Computing education with the Java language by avoiding (or hiding) some of the complexities of GUIs. At Virginia Tech, we have been using GUIs in our introductory Java courses for a few years; the JTF is one of the most recent approaches we have explored.
10:45 AM	Morning Break
11:00 AM	Discussion of the use of JTF in your classrooms
Noon	Lunch
1:30 AM	Media Computation, Dr. Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Prof. Dwight Barnette This session will provide a very brief introduction to Media Computation (MC) and Python. The instructors will present several of the typical examples of graphic and sound manipulations used in MC. Participants will be able to work on some of the assignments we use in our freshmen courses. The discussion will focus on the assignments given to the students and how they can engage them into computing.
3:30 PM	Afternoon Break
4:00 PM	Exploring closed labs for Media Computation
5:00 PM	Adjourn
6:00 PM	Dinner on your own, explore Downtown Blacksburg.
Wednesday June 22^nd, 2011
6:30 AM - 8:30 AM	Breakfast at the Hotel
9:00 AM	Using App Inventor, Meg Kurdziolek, Phd Candidate This session will provide a brief introduction to App Inventor. App Inventor lets you develop applications for Android phones using a web browser and an emulator. Meg was a summer intern at Google where she worked with teachers exploring how to integrate App Inventor to their classrooms.
10:30 AM	Morning Break
10:45 AM	CS Principles Panel
11:45 AM	Moving Forward: wrap up discussion, evaluation, debriefing
noon	Adjourn: Boxed lunches available to go.