Shannon Duvall

Creating a games class: a walkthrough

Adding a games class to a traditional computer science curriculum is becoming a popular way to attract and motivate students to consider computing. However, there are many decisions to be made when adding such a course to an existing Computer Science curriculum. What are the goals of the course? What platform and editor should be used? How should the course be administered? This paper gives a walkthrough of creating a games class that fits in a traditional curriculum, based on experience of creating the CSC 420 course at Elon University.

Using FLOSS Project Metadata in the Undergraduate Classroom

This paper describes our efforts to use the large amounts of data available from public repositories of free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) in our undergraduate classrooms to teach concepts that would have previously been taught using other types of data from other sources.

Scrumage: A Method for Incorporating Multiple, Simultaneous Pedagogical Styles in the Classroom

Pedagogical approaches abound in computer science. Common approaches include flipped classrooms, active learning, gamification, and the traditional lecture-based approach. There are also a wide variety of computer science learning materials including videos, interactive tutorials, and textbooks (whether presented online or on paper). Instructor choices of approach and materials present a series of trade-offs and may favor some groups of students over others. We propose a method, Scrumage, (SCRUM for AGile Education) in an attempt to overcome the necessity of making trade-offs. We allow each student in a course to select among several pedagogical approaches and sets of materials to fit each individual students learning needs and desires. Scrumage adapts concepts from the Scrum project management technique. In Scrum, project teams are developing a product for a client. In Scrumage, student teams are developing knowledge with support from the instructor. We define and motivate Scrumage and discuss the implementation and outcomes of the technique in a class at our undergraduate institution.

Reshaping the image of computer science in only fifteen minutes (of class) a week

Low undergraduate enrollments in computer science will not meet the future demand of employers. Some reasons for the low enrollments are computer sciences nerdy image, lack of understanding of the field, and low motivation for learning programming. We propose to change the image of computer science by exposing students to applications of computing and its impact on their lives through reading and discussing recent news articles in 15 minutes of class. We call this component of our courses the Broader Issues in computer science. In this paper, we present our motivation for the Broader Issues component, how we implemented the component in CS0 and CS1 courses, and our evaluation of the component, including student reactions to and impact of the component.

Computer science III: a required course on client-server computing

Cisco predicts that over 14 billion devices will be connected over the internet by the year 2010 [2]. The internet has changed the way we live, play, work and learn. The majority of software applications that are under development or will be developed in the next five to ten years will be distributed. The Elon faculty have added a required course, Computer Science III, to insure that every computer science undergraduate has foundational client server concepts and skills. This paper discusses the development and implementation of a Computer Science III course.

Automatic Environment Adjustment for Emotional Disabilities

One often-overlooked area for assistive technology is help for those with emotional needs. Since these individuals may not emote in a typical way, most techniques for affective computing will not work for this population. Further, the applications that detect emotion are generally concerned with helping the user with some task, not simply helping them with their emotional difficulties. In this work, we present React 2 Me, a system that uses ambient technology to detect multimodal behavioral cues that may indicate emotional distress and adjust the environment to help the individual regulate their emotions.

Clashroom: A Game to Enhance the Classroom Experience (Abstract Only)

Clashroom is a web-based fantasy game that was created to enhance the motivation and learning of a traditional classroom. It was created to address several drawbacks of other educational games by being broadly applicable to any course, requiring no class time, and allowing for optional rather than mandatory game play. Each player in the game is a dragon trainer, hoping to train a champion pet dragon. To gain skills and magical items for the dragon to use, players complete educational quests set up by the teacher. Players compete in weekly tournaments, where the quest rewards are vital to success. Because the gameplay and the learning material are decoupled, the game can be used for any subject at any level. After initial testing, students report that the game is fun and that the intrinsic rewards of a fun game are motivation enough for extra learning.

Implementation of DomCAT: the domain complexity analysis tool for natural language dialog processing

While dialog system technology is advancing, there is a lack of theory allowing the vastly different domains for systems to be compared. As a result, all predictions of the cost of building a new dialog system must be made by a dialog expert based on intuition and experience. Recently it has been proposed that entropy can be used as a complexity measure for dialog systems. These calculations would require domain specifications and understanding of information theory. This paper introduces the Domain Complexity Analysis Tool, or DomCAT. With this tool, anyone with basic knowledge of dialog systems can calculate system complexities and create new dialog domain specifications, and dialog complexity calculations can become standard for the field.