Adrienne Decker

Through the looking glass: reflections on using undergraduate teaching assistants in CS1

Over the last several years, there have been reports of many institutions using undergraduate students as teaching assistants (UTAs) in the classroom for CS1 as well as other courses in the curriculum. The literature has shown successes over a wide range of class sizes and UTA responsibilities. At University at Buffalo, we have been using undergraduates as teaching assistants in our CS1 course since Spring 2002, and have been impressed with the results. Throughout the deployment of the UTA program, the instructors of CS1 have observed that when UTAs are utilized in the classroom, both the students and the UTAs themselves benefit from their interactions. The UTAs have also become actively involved in providing feedback about the course design and have been suggesting improvements to assignments and in-class examples. They have also been involved in the process to hire new UTAs to replace those that are graduating. We have observed that such interactions have improved the UTAs sense of investment and ownership in the CS1 course.

We claim this class for computer science: a non-mathematician's discrete structures course

We have recently launched a reorganized discrete structures course being taught in the computer science department for computer science majors. The main idea of the reorganization is to make the course relevant and productive for the computer science students. During the Spring of 2003, students who were taking both discrete structures and CS2 commented that taking both courses at the same time was helpful. An empirical investigation was conducted to see if there was a benefit to students taking both courses concurrently. The results show that there was a benefit to students taking both courses. The students who were taking both courses were performing better in discrete structures than those students who were not.

Worked examples for sound object-oriented pedagogy: a "killer" workshop

The Killer Examples workshops are highly interactive workshops, held annually at OOPSLA since 2002. The workshop goals are to bring together educators and developers to share their object-oriented expertise, and provide a forum for discussion of teaching techniques and pedagogical goals. The theme of last years workshop was process in the pedagogy of object orientation; the theme of this years workshop is pedagogically sound examples for object orientation: examples which are structured to support student learning. The workshop solicits examples which can be used in the teaching of object orientation. Submitters present their examples at the workshop; participants in the workshop will critique the examples and actively engage in refining the examples in a way that they support a clear and sound pedagogy. The workshop accepts walk-ins if space permits and walk-ins are determined to have adequate interest and background in the workshop theme to contribute positively to the discussions.

Green: a flexible UML class diagramming tool for eclipse

This poster presents continuing work on Green UML. Green is a UML class diagram plug-in for the Eclipse IDE developed originally for educational purposes. Due to this nature of the tool, its prominent features include live round-tripping and a customizable set of relationships. As a plug-in to Eclipse, Green is able to utilize the development environment and maintain a real-time synchronization between its class diagrams and the Java source code. The extensible style of Eclipse plug-ins also allows Green to have its own plug-ins, which in turn are the relationship semantics. By allowing end users to create, add, and remove relationships which are recognized by Green, the too becomes highly flexible and easily tailors to a users specific needs.