Schedule (Summer 2010)

If you build a new course, will students come? This session will provide information and strategies to actively attract students into your class, including girls and minority students. Topics include why students should take CS and why they don’t, and strategies for recruiting, including who influences student choices, audience analysis, messages that influence students and their influencers, communication tactics for reaching and talking to students, and ways of overcoming objections.

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.

This session will provide a very brief introduction to Media Computation (MC) and Python. I will present several of the typical examples of graphic manipulations used in MC. I will show examples used both in our freshman course as well as examples used in a middle school class on computer programming. The discussion will focus on how a single type of artifact (in this case a program that performs computations on images) can be used in different academic levels with different goals. The college 1st year course introduces programming to students while the middle school course was intended to introduce computational concepts but not necessarily programming.

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.