Wendy A. Lawrence-Fowler

Emulating a corporate software development environment through collaboration between student projects in six courses

Corporate software development often takes place within a complex organizational structure, potentially encompassing many individuals. With constant improvements in network and communication technologies, those organizations may be widely distributed through time and space. In computer science and education, group projects are typically included as part of an undergraduate and graduate engineering curriculum to help prepare students for the dynamics of the business workplace. However, the groups tend to be much smaller than those typically found in the international corporate world where engineers are required to participate in large groups that are dispersed through geography and time zones. We describe a collaboration between student projects in six courses that aims to emulate such an international corporate software development environment. The collaboration brought together three faculty members and over 90 undergraduate and graduate students to work on a software project for a real client. Through this experience, we learned valuable lessons regarding the importance of communication and coordination between the faculty and student participants in a large-scale project.

A Computer Science course in Cyber Security and Forensics for a multidisciplinary audience

The preparation of a graduate level cyber security and forensics course in a computer science department that addresses theory, policy, and application for a multidisciplinary student audience can be daunting when the majority of students in the class do not have a computer science background. The course takes a holistic approach to broaden knowledge and deepen understanding of the domain of cyber security using cross disciplinary teams to gain understanding and experience taking theory to practice and practice to theory. A framework of understanding is built through the examination of the body of scholarly conceptual and technical works and hands on experience with hardware and software platforms and networks. Computer Science provides the theoretical underpinnings and technical details, methods, and tools to examine security concepts; Forensic Science provides the approach to critical analysis of digital evidence; and Behavioral Analysis provided a way to synthesize knowledge and scientific method to gain some understanding of criminal behavior as well as the breadth and economic impact of cybercrime. This approach resulted in students who gained technical proficiency and perspective and experience working with people with divergent backgrounds, abilities and knowledge sets.

Convergence of evolutionary biology and software engineering: Putting practice in action

This paper presents a project in experiential learning where students put knowledge of software engineering processes into action in a multidisciplinary project combining computer science and biology. Visualization serves as a primary element to bind the concepts of the two disciplines. Students seeking to further their experience and strengthen their skills in software engineering may choose to complete their senior capstone course working on an ongoing project to construct a toolkit for visualization of phylogenies generated from Avida experimental data. Avida provides a complex computational environment in which the evolution of digital organisms is tracked and analyzed to help find answers to a wide range of research questions. Student projects involve extensions of existing analytic and visualization techniques, as well as the addition of new, often novel, techniques. Importantly, to be successful a visualization technique must be appropriate for the domain in which it is to be used, requiring students to also understand elements of biology. It is our premise that exposing computer science students to the convergence of these two disciplines will strengthen their ability to work at different levels of abstraction and develop new conceptual frameworks to address current and future challenges in hardware and software.

Bridging the divide: Strategies for college to career readiness in computer science

The conversations and debates concerning how a students time on campus translates to better results upon graduation are not going away. Every day institutions of higher education are challenged to explicitly demonstrate and provide a clear articulation of the value of education as measured by post-graduation employment. We discuss strategies implemented in a computer science program to address the issue of student preparation for the workplace of the 21st century. We discuss the extension of more traditional experiential learning methods including project based courses, capstone courses, cooperative experiences and internships to assist students in developing the necessary skills required to transition from college to the workplace.

Heterogeneous information resources and asynchronous workgroups: creating a focus on information discovery and integration in computer science

The widespread availability of network communication allows the educational community to provide students with skills needed for the pervasive changes in information access and utilization that are occurring. These skills center on developing techniques for learning in an environment which has a broad range of heterogeneous information resources. The university environment we create provides students with opportunities to acquire skills needed for success in a distributed workplace in which electronic tool use and information discovery, organization, and utilization are the principal activities in problem solving.