SIGCSE

Developing a learning suppliment to support the breadth-first computer science curriculum and taking advantage of emerging technologies to provide interactive, demand-driven simulations which enhance comprehension of abstract concepts in computer ...

In [Wall96], Wallingford describes an approach to introductory courses that is based on programming patterns, i.e., algorithms or problem-solving approaches that can be applied to various applications. By focusing on patterns such as "Input-Process-Test"...

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 ...

This paper presents information from a survey of departments offering accredited computer science degree programs. It discusses demographic information related to curricula, faculty, and students for all such programs, and identifies various trends ...

One of the curriculum design problems facing computer science is the pressure to add new courses to cover additional topics. Often there is no curriculum space available. In some cases, the topics are covered more effectively by distributing them among ...

A traditional computer science program, in the liberal arts tradition and environment, has been in existence at Allegheny College for many years. The program was designed and adopted in 1979 [6] and the ideas and structure of that program became a ...

An object-oriented software life-cycle model, the Modified Spiral Model, was successfully used as the software process in the software engineering course in the Department of Computer Science, California State University, San Bernardino. The model lends ...

The growing use of Object-Oriented Databases (OODBs) has necessitated the inclusion of OODBs in introductory database courses. Typically, such an analysis is conducted after the explication of the dominant industry standard: the Relational Database ...

Class assignments should have more relevance to the real world. There is not enough time to have a realistic project in a class, but a realistic project would give the students a taste of the real world.We attacked this problem by merging two classes, ...

This paper involves an interdisciplinary project in computer science and physics. Students in introductory physics courses need to be able to deal with dimensioned quantities (often called "dimensional analysis"), and to solve problems using the correct ...

In teaching object oriented design, it is important for students to work on projects that use a variety of design patterns, interaction between objects, and provide the opportunity to explore design options in a realistic setting. Originally, object ...

Visualization is a useful tool in many areas of computer science education. This paper describes the use of visualization in the introduction of object-oriented concepts. A Java application has been developed that allows the user to interact with a ...

Debate concerning the content of the general education Computer Science course or the "Computer Literacy" course captures the interest and divides the opinion of the Computer Science community. This paper describes three of the typical difficulties (...

At Villanova University we have a popular course for non-majors focused on problem solving with computers, taught using our own lecture and lab materials. This paper seeks to describe the essence of the problem solving course by focusing on an ...

The challenge of a computer literacy course is to present general principles of computer science, while at the same time engaging students who are nonmajors and demonstrating the relevance of the subject. In this paper we describe our experience with a ...

The female role models presented to young women are often unusual individuals who have overcome tremendous social and political obstacles to pursue outstanding careers in mathematics and science. We believe that young women presented with these ...

The problem of disproportional representation of females in computer science curricula was examined in the context of Holland's theory of vocational personality. It was hypothesized that some combination of standardized mathematical aptitude and ...

Worldwide, there is a significant discrepancy between the numbers of male and female graduates from computer science programs. SUNY Geneseo offers no exception. The literature cites a number of plausible explanations for the problem, but no definitive ...

The work described in this paper is part of an NSF funded project to develop tutorial materials for introductory computer science courses. We had several general goals for these materials that had an impact on their design and implementation:• they ...

This paper presents the use of Java applets acting as a web-based interface to existing, platform dependent software tools. We present an example application called GAWebTutor which was constructed from a comprehensive genetic algorithm package and web-...

This paper describes a tool for teaching curve design. This tool is a component of the software tools to be used in a computing with geometry course [3, 4] that is being developed under the support of National Science Foundation. Curve design is ...

Computer networks can be very useful, but difficult to manage. Current network management tools tend to be either very expensive or inadequate for classroom modification. XSNIFF is a project to develop an alternative network monitoring tool with a ...

The advent of the World Wide Web changes the way we do things. It also greatly changes how computer software are built. While this profound evolution of software development has caused many in the software industry to change their way of developing ...

Teaching a computer networks course can be a challenge both in terms of deciding on the focus of the course and providing appropriate practical experiences to complement the theoretical issues. However, because the course overlaps other areas of the ...

The author's institution requires all students to take one course that concentrates on writing at the upper division (junior or senior) level. The computer science department offers one such course, taught by computer scientists. It concentrates on ...

The idea of a hierarchical design and integration of programming projects in the computer science undergraduate curriculum is proposed and discussed. Research results in software reuse and object-oriented design and development may be used in the design ...

In this paper it is claimed that traditional examination often is destructive to the process of learning. It does not matter how good intentions educators have, it is the way they examine students that will have the strongest impact on how the students ...

Traditionally, a large introductory course meant a lecture hall with a single lecturer talking and students taking notes---but no longer. Today a wide variety of techniques, not only in the classroom but in labs and faculty offices and cyberspace, can ...

On-line programming tests and examinations were administered to approximately 120 first year computer science students in order to evaluate their practical skills. We describe our motivation for on-line testing, outline the technical details of our ...