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A couple of weeks ago, Barb and I were awarded Georgia Tech’s Service Award for our work with Georgia Computes!. At the same awards ceremony, across the table, was David Collard of Chemistry who was getting the Professional education award.  He’s been part of an effort (described below) called cCWCS which teaches chemistry faculty how to teach better — and the program has taught over a thousand faculty!

A thousand faculty?!?  I’ve blogged about how hard it is to get CS faculty to come to our workshops, either Media Computation or Georgia Computes.  I’ve talked to other folks who offer workshops to CS faculty, and they say that they have to invite high school teachers, too, or they won’t have enough people to run the workshop.  Why do so many Chemistry professors show up, when we struggle to get CS professors to show up at teaching workshops?

Barb had an interesting insight: Maybe it’s because Chemistry is taught to everyone.  When you teach something to everyone, you have to teach…

Computing Education Blog

This is clearly the report that Eric Roberts was referencing in his recent (very popular) guest post (over 20K page views!):

For the third year computer science enrollments have increased, ending the precipitous decline in enrollments that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000-2001.

When that speculative bubble burst, the subsequent shakeout and unemployment in the tech industry sent enrollments plummeting, raised concerns that the U.S. competitiveness would suffer in the long-run. Enrollments are arching up, but are still well below the peak reached nearly 10 years ago.

The Computer Research Association (CRA), which tracks enrollments and graduation rates for computer science students, says enrollments in computer science programs were up last fall by 10%.

via Computer science enrollments rebound, up 10% last fall – Computerworld.

Tagged: image of computer science, undergraduate enrollment
Computing Education Blog

Thanks to Sarita Yardi for these. Talk about CS Unplugged!

Tagged: image of computing
Computing Education Blog

I loved this story about the professional women in Computing reaching out when they hear about the all-girls CS class.  Not clear that that always works.  I’ve heard that studies of outreach efforts find that sending a real scientist into the classroom often scares the kids away from science.  But in this example, it’s about changing stereotypes, about convincing the students that people who look like them work in this field.

When female engineers working at Cisco’s Toronto offices heard about Cardinal Leger’s all-girls program at the nearby Dufferin-Peel Catholic District school board, they invited the students for a visit.

“I think a lot of women don’t go into this field because they’re afraid of being the only girl,” said Hena Prasanna, a Cisco manager who met with the Cardinal Leger girls. “When we asked the girls who worked in the tech industry, they said chubby guys with glasses. That’s the impression they had and we wanted to change that.”

via Girls-only computer class hits…

Computing Education Blog

We’re in the thick of it in my data structures class this semester: Doubly-linked lists last week, trees (scene graphs) this week.  And I’m running headfirst into my students’ misconceptions, which are surprisingly similar and pervasive.  Here’s an exchange that’s really had me thinking.

• I was creating a linked list of picture elements.  I declared a variable for holding the pictures, Picture p.  Then, I created a picture object, and stuffed it into a new node, e.g., “p = new Picture(…); node1 = new PictureNode(p);” and repeated this for node2, node3, and node4. A student raises her hand. “How many picture objects did you just create?”  I counted: “3.”  ”But you only declared one Picture variable p?  Isn’t that just one object?”
• I then executed the statement (this is all DrJava, so I could do it interactively, like an interpreter): “node1.setNext(new PictureNode(p))”  Another student took up the questioning, with the question that’s been bugging me since: “If you just created a…

Computing Education Blog

Courtesy of IBM

Watson’s human competitors made Wednesday’s final Jeopardy! match more competitive, but, in the end, the IBM supercomputer came out on top—by more than $ 50,000.

Ken Jennings, who, along with Brad Rutter, made up the computer’s competition on three episodes of the game show beginning Monday, had a sense of humor about the drubbing.

“I for one welcome our new computer overlords,” the former Jeopardy! champion scrawled below the answer to the competition’s final question.

The victory made one group of people very happy.

The computer-science department at the University of Texas at Austin hosted viewing parties for the first two nights of the competition.

“People were cheering for Watson,” says Ken Barker, a research scientist at Texas. “When they introduced Brad and Ken, there were a few boos in the audience.”

Texas is one of eight universities whose researchers helped develop the technology on which Watson is based. Many of the other universities hosted viewing…

Wired Campus

This story came across ACM Technews, with the claim that “University of Alberta researchers have found that high school girls become more interested in computer science if video game creation is incorporated into the lesson plans.” That’s a strong and surprising claim, countering what other studies (including ours) have found.

A pre-print of the journal article is available.  The claim is a bit strong.  First, the researchers never asked the kids if they were interested in computer science or game development!  They asked the students to compare how much fun they had short story writing at school, to interactive story writing at the University on a field trip, to interactive story writing at school, and then to compare traditional writing to interactive writing at school.  Kids far preferred interactive story writing at the University to writing a traditional short story –everybody enjoyed the field trip.  However, for the girls, the difference at school was not significant, while…

Computing Education Blog

Photo courtesy of Jeopardy Productions Inc.

Raymond J. Mooney will be rooting for IBM’s Watson computer as it takes on two former Jeopardy! champions next week.

“As a tech person, you’re always rooting for the machine,” says Mr. Mooney, a computer-science professor at the University of Texas at Austin. But this time his allegiance is more pointed: His research is behind Watson’s ability to understand Alex Trebek’s questions (or answers, in the classic Jeopardy! format). In fact, Austin and seven other universities contributed many of the concepts that IBM developers drew on to make Watson work.

Mr. Mooney will tune in Monday at a viewing party the computer-science department is hosting and then watch the final night of the competition Wednesday at IBM’s offices in Austin, where he and his colleagues will participate in a question-and-answer session.

His specialty, natural-language learning, will be important for Watson’s performance on the game show.

“Natural language is ambiguous…

Wired Campus

At CE21, I met Aman Yadav, an assistant professor in educational studies at Purdue.  He’s actually teaching a CS methods course (how to teach CS effectively), in a program that teaches pre-service high school teachers!  How exciting!  He only has one student.  Aman says that he doesn’t know how many semester that they can afford to offer the class with so few students.  The one teacher he has is a math education major, who is taking a minor in CS education.  Nobody there is going after CS education as their main focus.

We were sitting at breakfast Tuesday morning with Wayne Summers, my collleague at Columbus State University where they have a program to give teachers an “endorsement” (a kind of certification that comes after a teacher’s initial certificate in teaching math, science, business, or whatever) to teach high school computer science.  He had one student, but she dropped out in the first semester.

I mentioned in a previous blog post that UTeach has been in existence for 14…

Computing Education Blog

Max Hailperin passed on this story to the SIGCSE-Members list.  He added that: “About 40 students will graduate from the program in May. But that will leave about 40 who haven’t. They hope to get those students through within two years. But even if they do, the students may be forced to take upper-level computer science classes from faculty who may not have taught them before.” Interesting that Aviation was going to be cancelled, too, but the local business community worked to save that program. But not CS.

It’s been a bit blue in Minnesota State University’s computer science department.

But it’s not hard to understand why.

“Everyone in the department has either been fired, retired or has resigned,” said Dean Kelley, one of those faculty members. “Two took retirement — one effective last year, one this year — one who was on a leave of absence and has resigned. As for the remaining three, the word they used was ‘retrenched.’”

Computer science as a functioning program at MSU will…

Computing Education Blog