Allen Stix

Developing a professional doctorate in computing: a fifth-year assessment

Pace Universitys Doctor of Professional Studies in Computing program, a fusion of academic and professional cultures, started as a venture into largely uncharted educational territory. One part of the mission was, and remains, a one hundred percent student retention rate, with each student successfully defending a dissertation with original research in three years. Yet, throughout, the students retain full-time employment as high-level computing and IT professionals. Another part of the mission is to provide breadth and currency across the computing disciplines (specifically, computer science, information systems, and telecommunications) as well as depth in annually selected areas of emerging technology. This is in a context in which entering students have masters degrees and generally at least five years of professional experience in diverse computing-related areas and therefore lack a common foundational background. As a new program at the University and in the country, penetrating assessments have been conducted each semester. This report describes the assessments, the anticipated and unanticipated challenges, and the steps that have made the evolutionary development of this program successful.

Applying abstraction to master complexity

Aptitude for managing abstraction may be a distinguishing characteristic of computer science majors. If this is so, and if this aptitude can be recognized among potential majors, those who are well suited for computer science but have not considered it as a major can be made aware of the possibility. Abstraction, as a human ability, is comprised of two complementary aspects: clearing away details to build simplifications and deriving generalizations that illuminate essentials. Agreement exists that this ability may be nurtured through instruction and experience, but that it rests upon a natural aptitude that is possessed by few. Agreement exists that this natural aptitude is assessable, although no instrument yet exists for measuring it efficiently among prospective computer science majors who have not begun computer science coursework. This paper deals with a study done at New Yorks Pace University to test undergraduate students across a range of majors for abstraction ability

The Trend Toward Online Project-Oriented Capstone Courses

At Pace University we have been using real-world student projects in capstone computing courses for about 10 years. While the courses were conducted in a traditional classroom environment during the early years, the current course has been essentially online for the last five years in order to reach a greater number of geographically scattered students. Findings indicate that appropriate team management changes can smooth the transition from co-located to distributed teams, and that peer evaluations and other remote assessment techniques make it possible to assess the work of students on distributed teams.

Security Informatics: A Paradigm Shift in Information Technology Education

Security informatics will represent a paradigmatic shift in college and university curricula in computer science, software engineering, information systems and science, networking and telecommunications, Internet technologies and related disciplines – the disciplines that might be assumed under the broad umbrella of ”information technology” – though most programs have not yet understood the import or implemented the systemic change. Faculty have experienced much technology change over the short history of computing and are much more frequently introducing change into courses and programs than their colleagues in other disciplines. The need for security in information applications in virtually every discipline will generate robust interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary opportunities for informatics (as different from information technology) programs.

PC-based video conferencing: guidelines for opening a remote section of a course

PC-based video conferencing allows graduate and undergraduate courses to be presented at multiple locations across campus, to be shared with distant colleges and universities, and to be piped to corporate sites. With inexpensive hardware and software, courses in jeopardy of insufficient enrolment can draw from a larger pool of students, and courses which would be geographically inaccessible can be made convenient. Unlike an asynchronous course (e.g. a course over the Internet) a conferenced course affords public, real-time discussions among the instructor and students. Conferenced courses do not require the creation of an elaborate self-study guide. We have twice presented a course on Windows programming in C++ to a class of 50 students, seven of whom attended in a classroom on another campus thirty miles from the instructor. Our equipment was modest and both iterations of the course were highly successful as judged from evaluations of student attainment, anonymous course evaluations by students, and the subjective impressions of the instructors. This paper adds our guidelines for conducting and managing such courses to those currently in the literature.

C++ and Object-Oriented Programming

So far in this book, the programming that has been done is conventional, or procedural, in fact, structured (using “a better C”), and analogous to Pascal with many convenient extensions. As everyone knows, structured programming can accomplish any programming job, and is certainly not obsolete. Structured programming uses both algorithms and data structures; although the programmer attends to both, the focus is probably on the algorithms.

Procedural C++ That Extends Pascal

Equipped with the C++ subset that covers Pascal, one can write any program in C++ that could have been written in Pascal. Reading code that others have written, however, leads to a discovery of additional operators, the use of dynamic allocation to enable the definition of nonlocal variables (i.e., nonlinked storage with a lifetime exceeding that of the function), and new capabilities of functions beyond those in Pascal. These are the topics discussed in Sections 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3, respectively. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the entire nonobject part of C++ (which includes C). The aim is to highlight those useful language structures that are characteristic of C++ that lack direct analogues in Pascal.

C++ as Structured Programming: An Historical Perspective

C++ can be learned as a structured object-oriented programming language, and can be particularly well learned that way by the Pascal programmer.

The C++ Subset That Covers Pascal

A frustrating part of beginning a new language is struggling to find the data structures, control structures, and embedding syntax required for the level of computational expressiveness to which one is accustomed. The aim of this chapter is to introduce that kernel of C++ which spans Pascal. Because this kernel is Pascal-like, Pascal programmers can learn it quickly and feel comfortable in C++ in short order. Familiarity with C is not required.

Multiple precision arithmetic: a programming assignment in CS2 applying linked lists

Students become appreciative of dynamically allocated storage structures when they are led to see problems. Further, students become skillful manipulators of linked lists only by implementing them. A good discussion on linked lists is found in [2]. Linked lists are introduced at the beginning of CS2, which is before students have seen trees and become aware of the extreme utility of branching data structures. The pedagogical question, then, is how to kindle excitement over an information structure that is linear, like an array, but more cumbersome. Coupled to this, can a genuinely interesting application be found which requires somewhat more than the maintenance of a single solitary queue? An exercise that worked well for us was a program to give exact values for n!, where the limit to the size of n is quite large (around 500). This paper sketches the assignment, as given to the class.