Jesse M. Heines

The design of a rule-based CAI tutorial

Abstract Rule-based systems are a development associated with recent research in artificial intelligence (AI). These systems express their decision-making criteria as sets of production rules, which are declarative statements relating various system states to program actions. For computer-assisted instruction (CAI) programs, system states are defined in terms of a task analysis and student model, and actions take the form of the different teaching operations that the program can perform. These components are related by a set of means-ends guidance rules that determine what the program will do next for any given state. The paper presents the design of a CAI course employing a rule-based tutorial strategy. This design has not undergone the test of full implementation; the paper presents a conceptual design rather than a programming blueprint. One of the unique features of the course design described here is that it deals with the domain of computer graphics. The precise subject of the course is ReGIS, the Remote Graphics Instruction Set on Digital Equipment Corporation GIGI and VT125 terminals. The paper describes the course components and their inter-relationships, discusses how program control might be expressed in the form of production rules, and presents a program that demonstrates one facet of the intended course: the ability to parse student input in such a way that rules can be used to update a dynamic student model.

Evaluating the Effect of a Course Web Site on Student Performance.

THE AUTHOR CREATED A NUMBER OF WEB SITES to enhance traditional classroom instruction in computer science courses. These Web sites included lecture notes, assignments, downloadable programs, links to sites related to the course subject matter, and a program allowing students to see their grades on all assignments and tests and thus determine exactly where they stood in the course at any time.This study reports on two types of data analyzed to gain insight into students’ use of the site: responses to an author-created survey and students’ final grades. Students demonstrated strong positive reactions to the course Web site on the survey and showed statistically significant final grade improvement after the Web site was introduced. While these results should be interpreted conservatively due to the large number of uncontrolled variables that affect student performance, they are nonetheless encouraging enough to warrant continued effort to develop and evaluate course Web sites.

Music performamatics: interdisciplinary interaction

This paper describes how a graphical user interface (GUI) programming course offered by the Dept. of Computer Science (CS) was paired with a general teaching methods course offered by the Dept. of Music in an attempt to revitalize undergraduate CS education and to enrich the experiences of both sets of students. The paper provides details on the joint project done in these classes and the evaluation that assessed its effect on the curriculum, students, and professors.

Visual programming abstractions for interactive multimedia presentation authoring

Various multimedia authoring environments have been developed, resulting in a variety of approaches as to how such presentations are structured and authored. Implicit in these systems is a data model for composing multimedia objects and a user interface model for the authoring activity. Making these models explicit is one goal of this work, since it will lead to the design of easier-to-use and more powerful tools. The authors distinguish the structure of the multimedia objects being composed and the different presentation states that the viewer experiences. The latter is what the author is most concerned with; the former is what most tools allow the author to directly manipulate. The authors illustrate these ideas with examples of multimedia authoring tools that they have developed, and suggest several directions for improvement.<<ETX>>

Two Approaches to Interdisciplinary Computing+Music Courses

The developers of a university curriculum designed to bridge the gaps between the two disciplines have found that there are numerous ways to introduce arts majors to computing, and science and engineering majors to the arts.

Computing and music: a spectrum of sound

This special session implements the first goal of the SIGCSE Committee on Computing and Music. It provides a venue in which the committee conveners can present their work to SIGCSE attendees and in return acquire information from others who are using music to promote learning of deep computing concepts. By describing four diverse approaches, the audience will understand the breadth of the topic and will be inspired to contribute to the effort.

Enabling XML storage from Java applets in a GUI programming course

XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is widely used in graphical user interface (GUI) programming today to both specify user interfaces and to hold the data displayed in visual components. It is relatively straightforward for Java applets to read and process XML documents over the Web, but security restrictions make it complex to store those documents back on the server after they have been modified. This paper describes a set of cooperating programs and their underlying algorithms that allow Java applets to read XML documents from - and, more importantly, to store those documents back to - a Java-enabled Web server. The author uses this approach in a GUI programming course to provide students who implement their projects as Java applets with the ability to use the full power of XML and its related technologies.

Teaching internationalization: internationally

This paper describes a foray into teaching internationalization by attempting to do a collaborative project between students in the United States and Poland. The project required Polish students to work with software developed by American students and to provide feedback to the Americans on how easy it was to understand and modify their code. Students communicated via email and online chats as well as in a live session facilitated by Google Hangout. The goals were to get students in both countries to appreciate the clarity needed to communicate and work with international colleagues and to have them experience the myriad issues involved in such collaborations. We report the details of the project we assigned, the processes we went through to set up the collaboration, and our successes and failures as we worked toward our goals.

Panel on revitalized undergraduate computing education

There is an imbalance in the supply and demand for computing professionals that has generated shortages in meeting personnel needs within industry. A major program was developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation to encourage innovations in undergraduate computing education. There are a variety of new projects that are revitalizing undergraduate computing education. One approach to such revitalization is the introduction of interdisciplinary courses to expand the scope of computing education. The basic idea is to have students from various disciplines work together on computing projects to expand their educational horizons and make computing courses more appealing. This panel brings together research managers with educators who have developed and taught interdisciplinary courses with these goals in mind. The panelists will share their experiences and solicit new ideas from the audience.

Perfect Harmony: Team Teaching Computing & Music

One of the ways to attract a more diverse group of students to computer science is by offering courses that are interdisciplinary. Some of the first examples of this combined multimedia with programming. There are many more possibilities, but as computer scientists, we often do not have the domain knowledge to teach these courses alone. Team teaching offers a solution to this dilemma. The goal of this panel is to present some of the problems we have encountered and to discuss some of the solutions.