David G. Kay

Automated grading assistance for student programs

Some instructors have used various sofiware tools to assist in the task of evaluating student programming assignments. The ability to collect students’ work in a consistent form and test it automatically against a wide range of data can enhance students’ skills in program design, coding, analysis, and testing, and can free the instructor from much tedium, allowing more time for more rewarding activities.

Large introductory computer science classes: strategies for effective course management

Traditionally, a large introductory course meant a lecture hall with a single lecturer talking and students taking notes---but no longer. Today a wide variety of techniques, not only in the classroom but in labs and faculty offices and cyberspace, can make a large introductory course an extremely effective educational experience. We explore these practices, with pointers for further information, as a guide for instructors or departments faced with the large-course model of instruction.

Bandwagons considered harmful, or the past as prologue in curriculum change

The field of computer science changes rapidly, and this change occurs as well in the introductory curriculum. Formerly advanced topics filter down to the first year, and even to secondary school; some topics disappear completely. These changes are good---they indicate a dynamic discipline and a still-emerging picture of the fields fundamental principles. But we must not let our revolutionary zeal blind us to the pedagogical need and conceptual value of time-tested material. Many topics and approaches that are well understood and now unfashionable should retain their place in the introductory curriculum, where they serve as intellectual ballast, foundation, and motivation for the more current and trendier content. We argue here for balance: that radical change be tempered by an appreciation for the place of long-standing approaches and underlying fundamentals. Those advocating curricular change must articulate their educational goals fully and consider explicitly what effect on those goals they expect the change to have; they must not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Collaboration vs plagiarism in computer science programming courses

In some circles, all programming is collaborative, yet in many CS1 and CS2 courses, individual programming assignments are made, collaboration with other students is cheating, and tailoring a program found on the web is plagiarism. Many educators feel that collaboration belongs only in a very few upper division courses. Others have experience to show that early collaboration broadens the learning of students, to become more effective professional individuals. Most conclude that a blend of the two styles is best for students, and can reduce cheating/plagiarism.Does collaboration belong in programming classes? Where does collaboration end and cheating/plagiarism begin? What are the advantages, problems and techniques of allowing collaboration on programming assignments in CS1 and CS2? The moderator created six discussion questions. Each member of the panel has chosen the position they can strongly support from experience. This panel will discuss these questions in detail among the panelists and audience.

Informatics: a novel, contextualized approach to software engineering education

Over the past decade, it has been established that a good education in software engineering requires a specialized program of study different from traditional computer science programs. What should constitute such a specialized program of study, however, is still a matter of debate. Here we bring to this debate a new perspective that describes how we believe software engineering education should be framed, namely through the context in which software eventually is placed. That is, we must study software and information, development and design, technical and social issues, synthesis and analysis. At UC Irvine, we have designed and now offer a program of study that provides this focus - a four-year B.S. degree in Informatics. In this paper, we present our view of software engineering education, the principles underlying our Informatics curriculum, an overview of the curriculum itself and its pedagogy, some reflections on our experiences to date, and a concluding list of challenges that our approach addresses and that are critical for any approach to software engineering education.

Training computer science teaching assistants: a seminar for new TAs

We describe a one-quarter seminar required of first-time teaching assistants in computer science. The seminar acclimates TAs to teaching undergraduates in the university, to departmental policies and to special problems and issues in teaching computer science. In addition to coverage of general issues surrounding teaching, the seminar includes many participatory exercises that relate specifically to the teaching of computer science. Participants in the seminar perform much better on student evaluations than non-participants.

Changes in the advanced placement computer science course: case studies and C++ (panel)

Case studies provide examples of good style, the use of language constructs, fundamental data structures, algorithms and applications. Moreover, case studies provide an economical way to deal with large programs. Large programs give the student practice in the management of complexity and motivate the use of certain programming practices, such as procedural decomposition, intermodule communication through parameter passing, data abstraction, and selection of data structures tailored to the needs of the problem.

A course in computer law

We describe a course for computer science students that covers the legal issues that apply to computing, from intellectual property protection to liability for system failures to computer crime.

An honors computer science seminar for undergraduate non-majors

We describe a course offered for six years as part of the Honors Collegium at UCLA. This small seminar introduced non-major honors students to concepts and current issues of computer science, culminating in a field study project applying computing to an area of the student’s interest. Background: The UCLA Honors Collegium offers a series of small seminar classes, designed to provide honors students with the opportunity for close interaction with distinguished faculty on interdisciplinary topics. Roughly a dozen courses per quarter are offered, with titles ranging from “The Geometry of Relativity” through “Mind, Brains, Humans, and Computers” and “Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change” to “Gender and Race: Construction of Greek Political Thought.” Students with gradepoint averages of at least 3.0 out of 4.0 who have completed their English Composition requirements are eligible. Faculty from a wide range of disciplines teach in the Honors Collegium, their time reimbursed to their home departments. Course description: From 1986 through 1991, the author taught an Honors Collegium course called “Computers, Science, and Computer Science,” which was described in the catalog as follows: “This course will furnish students with an in-depth, fundamental understanding of computers and the nature of automatic computation, both in theory and in current practice: what information computers can represent and how they can process it; the distinctions between human thought and the computer’s processing; the social effects of computerization and reliance on computed rePermission to oopy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fae and/or specific permission. ACM-24thCSE-2/93 -lN,USA @ 1993 ACM 0-89791-566-6/93/0002/0141 . ..

A balanced approach to first-year computer science

l .50 suits; the capabilities and limitations of computer technology both today and in the future. Students will develop the foundation for making informed decisions relating to computing and the framework for developing further technical expertise.” The rationale behind this grandiose agenda is partly to help students appreciate some of the intellectual issues th~at underlie computer science. But there is also a more practical purpose: The students in this course do not plan to become computing professionals, but as university students they will probably manage computing professionals, make purchasing and other management decisions about computing, and influence public policy about computing. We want them to develop a framework for making these decisions in an informed way, given the constraints of a single one-quarter course and their non-technical backgrounds. One approach to courses like this is to cover programming and algorithms to some degree of mathematical formality. Indeed, an Honors Collegium course created recently does take this approach, using the text by Goldschlager and Lister[l]. We took the approach of de-emphasizing some of the more formal content—algorithm design and analysis, for example, and actual coding-because we felt there was hardly enough time to do those topics justice and still cover the larger issues, especially given that few of the students had the mathematical sophistication necessary to appreciate a formal treatment. In the most recent offering we used two texts, a general introduction by Biermann[z] and a biographical supplement by Slatert31. We supplement these with various readings, such as the Daedak issue on artificial intelligence (reprinted as [4]) and the Parnas article on SDI[51. The course met over a ten-week quarter once a week for three hours, during which discussion (and some lecture) was led by the instructor, usually accompanied by a gradw ate student TA. We provided electronic mail and Internet news access to the students and encouraged them to explore; beyond that, we required no hands-on computing. The course was graded on class participation, a field-studly term project (described below), and on individual half-hcur