Stuart Reges

Nifty assignments

Creating assignments is a difficult and time consuming part of teaching Computer Science. Nifty Assignments is a forum, operating at a very practical level, to promote the sharing of assignment ideas and assignment materials.Each presenter will introduce their assignment, give a quick demo, and describe its niche in the curriculum and its strengths and weaknesses. The presentations (and the descriptions below) merely introduce each assignment. For more detail, each assignment has its own web page with more detailed information and assignment materials such as handouts and data files to aid the adoption of the assignment. Information on participating in Nifty Assignments as well as all the assignment pages are available from our central page… http://cse.stanford.edu/nifty/

Conservatively radical Java in CS1

Java is fast becoming the language of choice in CSI, but we have yet to figure out how to take full advantage of its special features. The conservatives teach the old course in Java syntax. The radicals restructure the course to include Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and concurrency. I prefer a “conservatively radical” middle ground where I use modern GUI programs to teach the old course concepts. I write GUI/concurrent code and ask my students to complete the program by supplying a particular class or two. Thus, they work on interesting problems without having to understand the details of how my code works. And in the process, they get a practical introduction to the modern programming experience of writing a small piece of a much larger program, allowing me to emphasize abstraction early.

Using undergraduates as teaching assistants at a state university

This paper describes a program that uses undergraduates as teaching assistants to staff large computer science classes, particularly at the introductory level. Creating such a program at a state school presented special challenges, but the program has become a mainstay for the departments undergraduate program. The program has been so successful that we have expanded it to cover some sophomore and junior level courses, including a discrete mathematics course. Among the benefits of the program are reduced overall cost, improved quality of instruction, the formation of an undergraduate community and the practical experience that the undergraduate teaching assistants themselves gain.

The effective use of undergraduates to staff large introductory CS courses

In the past few years many schools have tried to simultaneously achieve the following goals in their introductory CS courses:Allow more students to enroll Improve the quality of education Keep spending at current levels Everyone has discovered that the first two goals are difficult to achieve in the presence of the third. This paper presents a model that has evolved over the last five years at Stanford University where all three goals have been accomplished by replacing graduate student TAs with undergraduate section leaders.

Teaching tips we wish they'd told us before we started

• Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor in Computer Science (1992) • Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (1997) • Computer Science Division Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching (2002) • Highest course “teaching effectiveness” rating of any CS lower division instructor, ever (6.6, tied with 1 other) (2004) • Computer Science Division Information Technology Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2005) • UC Berkeley “Everyday Hero” Award (2005) • Highest course “teaching effectiveness” rating of any CS lower division instructor, ever (6.7, tied with 1 other) (2006)

Broadening participation: The why and the how

There are many reasons for striving to increase the representation of women in the computing field, but the most compelling one is the enhanced quality of the solutions diverse contributors can achieve. This is one of five articles providing industry perspectives on gender diversity in computing.

SIGPLAN programming language curriculum workshop: Discussion Summaries and recommendations

A college education has two goals. First, to produce intellectually mature, sophisticated leaders who can think deeply and productively in a range of fields and contexts. Second, to provide students with skills that they can apply successfully throughout a long career in their chosen profession or professions. Programming language concepts and ways of thinking can be a critically important part of the successful education of virtually any college student, regardless of discipline. For computer scientists these concepts and ways of thinking are indispensible.

Nifty assignments panel

Introduction • The output, activity, and bugs of the program all express themselves visually. The Nifty Assignments panel is a practical forum for the sharing of assignment ideas — demonstrating good assignment features and tradeoffs, and providing concrete materials for the CSE community to use. • It is extensible in various ways. Examples: multiple implementations of the region list, one using an array, the other using a linked list; support of colored squares within regions (clicking on an uncolored area creates a square, and clicking on a colored square erases it). Each panelist will introduce the basic idea of their assignment, give a quick demo, and describe its niche in the curriculum — its strengths and weaknesses. The live presentation is merely an introduction to each assignment. Fortunately, the following web page has handouts, data files, etc. for each of the assignments... Stuart Reges Personality Test (CS1) This assignment is based on a personality/temperament test developed by Keirsey and Bates in the pop-psych book Please Understand Me. The first part of the assignment is a straightforward application of 70 multiple choice questions. Collecting answers to these questions is a fine CS1 problem which may or may not be used as part of the assignment (if not, there are tools to do it). http://cse.stanford.edu/nifty/

Marketing the programming languages course

Programming languages as a required course is disappearing from undergraduate computer science programs. This is not surprising given that the course often proves to be challenging for faculty to teach and unpopular among students. The author argues that the best way to convince departments to retain this material is to emphasize the benefit to undergraduates of stretching their understanding of programming early in their careers.

Report of the 2008 SIGPLAN programming languages curriculum workshop: preliminary report

This special session will present a summary of the recommendations of the First SIGPLAN Workshop on Undergraduate Programming Language Curricula, held at Harvard University in May, 2008. The purpose of the workshop was to generate new recommendations for programming languages topics to be learned by all undergraduate CS majors. In this special session we will present a summary of the curriculum recommendations, why they were made, and ways of incorporating them into undergraduate CS curricula.