Daniel D. McCracken

Offshore outsourcing: current conditions & diagnosis

2. ERNEST FERGUSON Shock waves still resonate after the widely cited 2002 Forrester Research report predicted at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and

Teaching human-computer interaction: reports from the trenches

136 billion in wages are expected to shift overseas by 2015 [8]. The report predicts nearly 1 million IT-related jobs will move offshore over the course of the next 15 years [4]. For computer scientists between 2000 and 2001, the jobless rate jumped from 2% to 5% [8]. Programming and general software development is no longer a specialized or rare skill. IT unemployment has resulted in decreased computer science / information systems enrollments throughout the United States.

The increasing role of computer theory in undergraduate curricula

Most schools introduce HCI into the CS curriculum through a bootstrapping process. There are many excellent HCI programs at universities around the world, and some new faculty with HCI graduate degrees are starting to appear. But the extreme shortage of faculty forces most schools now starting to teach HCI to use the time-honored method of learning a subject by teaching it.Consensus: Insert HCI into any opening you can find. Learn more about the subject yourself. Let colleagues get comfortable with the idea. A required course in HCI may be some years off, or maybe you will never do exactly that, but you will have laid the foundation for getting HCI into your curriculum.

An inductive approach to teaching object-oriented design

CSAB states in its guidelines that one of its six undergraduate core curriculum subject areas is computer theory. It appears that the ACM Core Curriculum Committee will also suggest a core course in this area. However, courses in computer theory, under the titles “Formal Languages” or “Theory of Computation”, have traditionally been taught on the senior or graduate level. There has been little discussion concerning the development of a computer theory course for use at the sophomore or junior level. Also, computer theory is also becoming a larger part of other computer science courses such as discrete structures and compiler design theory. A clearer understanding is needed of how different aspects of computer theory should be developed throughout the undergraduate computer science curriculum.

A conversation about computer science education

An approach is described in which students learn object-oriented design by using as many of the characteristics of real program development (starting with incomplete specifications, etc.) as possible in a one-month project. Two-person teams are used, both for the benefit of team experience and to divide the effort between an algorithm portion and a GUI portion. Examples of student work are given, together with suggestions for other projects. Ideas for running a project are given in a week-by-week listing. The paper ends with suggestions for grading.

Directions in programming languages (panel discussion)

This discussion began as an invitation to comment on the advisability of replacing some of the study of data structure implementation in CS2. It broadened into a discussion of a number of other aspects of computer science education. Dennis Frailey writes from an industrial point of view, although he also teaches computer science on an adjunct basis and was once a full-time academic. Dan McCracken writes from an academic point of view, although he has also worked in industry.

The role of fourth generation languages in computer science education (panel session)

This session features discussions of four different programming languages: Ada, C, LISP, and Nomad. These languages illustrate the different directions in which programming languages have been evolving. They have been chosen both for their importance individually and for the contrast among them. Each is dominant, or promises to be dominant, in a particular user community, but the user communities are quite different. The panelists will describe each language in turn, its user community, its past, and its likely future, and present the case why the language is superior to its competitors. Controversy among the panelists will be encouraged.

Programming languages in the computer science curriculum

After being in use now for approximately ten years, Fourth Generation Languages (4GLs) are of growing importance in the data processing industry. Their main benefits are substantial productivity gains in application development, end-user computing capabilities and easier maintenance. They are replacing Third Generation Languages such as COBOL and PL/l. Despite the impact of 4GLs in industry it seems that CS and MIS curricula generally ignore the subject, with only scattered pilot courses to date.