Joel C. Adams

An expanding pipeline: gender in mauritius

The gender imbalance in computer science in the U.S. and other countries has attracted much attention. This paper presents - for comparison - the computing-related gender ratios in Mauritius, a developing country in the Indian Ocean. These ratios suggest that far from being a universal phenomenon, the gender imbalance in the U.S. is a cultural problem.

Chance-It: an object-oriented capstone project for CS-1

Most people enjoy playing games. Most CS-1 students will enjoy a final project that involves computational game-playing. Chance-It is a simple two-person dice game with many possible strategies at varying levels of sophistication and complexity. These features make the problem of formalizing and encoding a strategy to play Chance-It an interesting final project for CS-1.This paper describes an object-oriented final project for CS-1 in which students build Player1 and Player2 classes to play Chance-It. A ChanceItGame class and driver are provided to coordinate the interactions of these classes. The project provides students with an enjoyable introduction to object-oriented design and the problem of formalizing and codifying human strategy in software. Examples are given in C++, but convert easily to Java.

What do students learn about programming from game, music video, and storytelling projects?

Drag-and-drop learning environments like Alice (alice.org) and Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) eliminate syntax errors, making them attractive as ways to introduce programming concepts to students. Alice is closely associated with storytelling, Scratch was designed for creating music videos, and both can be used to create games. Having had students create each kind of project, we began to wonder: Do students learn different things creating games compared to music videos or stories? What programming constructs do students actually use (and hence learn well enough to be able to apply)? To answer these questions, we conducted a quantitative analysis of a collection of over 300 different student projects created using these tools. In examining different kinds of projects, we found significant differences in how frequently the students creating those projects used variables, if statements, loops, and dialog constructs.

Scratching middle schoolers' creative itch

Each July since 2003, the author has directed summer camps that introduce middle school boys and girls to the basic ideas of computer programming. Prior to 2009, the author used Alice 2.0 to introduce object-based computing. In 2009, the author decided to offer these camps using Scratch, primarily to engage repeat campers but also for variety. This paper provides a detailed overview of this outreach, and documents its success at providing middle school girls with a positive, engaging computing experience. It also discusses the merits of Alice and Scratch for such outreach efforts; and the use of these visually oriented programs by students with disabilities, including blind students.

Strategies for preparing computer science students for the multicore world

Multicore computers have become standard, and the number of cores per computer is rising rapidly. How does the new demand for understanding of parallel computing impact computer science education? In this paper, we examine several aspects of this question: (i) What parallelism body of knowledge do todayâ s students need to learn? (ii) How might these concepts and practices be incorporated into the computer science curriculum? (iii) What resources will support computer science educators, including non-specialists, to teach parallel computing? (iv) What systemic obstacles impede this change, and how might they be overcome? We address these concerns as an initial framework for responding to the urgent challenge of injecting parallelism into computer science curricula

On the diagnosis of Byzantine faults

The class of evidence-based diagnosis algorithms is developed to identify Byzantine (and any other faulty) processors. Such algorithms are said to be fair if they identify no failure-free processor as faulty. This paper makes two significant contributions: (i) it introduces a very general and simple formal model of the evidence-based diagnosis algorithms; and (ii) it derives a simple fair diagnosis algorithm, which is proved optimal for a large class of algorithms. It is further demonstrated that no fair evidence-based diagnosis algorithm can guarantee the identification of all faulty processors (completeness). Several insights into the behavior of the algorithm are presented.<<ETX>>

Small-college supercomputing: building a Beowulf cluster at a comprehensive college

A Beowulf cluster is a MIMD multiprocessor built from commodity off-the-shelf personal computers connected via a dedicated network, running free open-source software. Such a cluster can provide a supercomputers performance at a small fraction of ones cost. For small colleges and universities, the relatively low cost of a Beowulf cluster makes it an attractive alternative to a commercial supercomputer. This paper details our experience building a Beowulf cluster at a four-year comprehensive college.

Distributed diagnosis of Byzantine processors and links

The problem of correctly identifying the faulty processors and links in a distributed system where faulty behavior is unrestricted (Byzantine) is examined. A very general class of algorithms called evidence-based diagnosis algorithms is proposed that encompasses all past approaches to the diagnosis problem. An algorithm is presented which is proven optimal in this class. It is further shown that, in the worst case, no evidence-based diagnosis algorithm can guarantee that its diagnosis is both correct and complete, when evidence can be false. It is argued both analytically and from experimental data that in systems of N processors of which t can be faulty, the complexity of this algorithm is O(max(2 to the power of t/sup 2/, N/sup 2/)).<<ETX>>

Object centered design for Java: teaching OOD in CS-1

Object-centered design (OCD) is a methodology developed to help novice C++ programmers learn to design software. By adapting OCD for use with Java, we can reduce the number of phases in OCD from five to three, and introduce object-oriented design (OOD) in CS-1 instead of CS-2.

Parallel computing to start the millennium

We describe the experience of three undergraduate computer science programs offering courses on parallel computing. In particular, we offer three different solutions to the problem of equipping a lab and discuss how those solutions may impact the content of the course.