Over 1000 computer science educators gathered in Portland Oregon for the 2008 ACM SIGCSE conference. The 39th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education provided a wide selection of technical sessions and opportunities for teachers to network and to learn. The topics ranged from innovative strategies for increasing classroom diversity to hands-on techniques with applications and curriculum.
I love the excitement of SIGCSE, especially the opportunities to catch up with friends and the discovery of new and innovative teaching strategies. I managed to catch up with some of the presenters and participants who I thought you wouldd value hearing from.
Please listen in on the following CSTA Snipits podcasts.
A GridWorld Quickstart with Ann Shen
Medium: MP3
Listening Time: 9 min.
Interview Location: ACM SIGCSE 2008 Portland, Oregon
Interview Date: March 2008
Ann Shen, The Bishop Strachan School:
Case studies expose students to large programs, enabling them to understand the importance of design and good programming style while encouraging teamwork and active learning. The AP GridWorld case study provides a graphical environment in which students can experiment with different types of objects and observe how programming changes will affect the behavior of those objects. It is significant that the test results show a smaller score difference between males and females on the case study questions than non-case study questions. In our visit, Ann describes this learning tool, compares and contrasts it to the previous AP case study, and gives teachers suggestions for using it in their computer science classroom.
CyberCivics with Jeanna Matthews and James Owens
Medium: MP3
Listening Time: 8.5 min.
Interview Location: ACM SIGCSE 2008 Portland, Oregon
Interview Date: March 2008
Jeanna Matthews and James Owens, Clarkson University
CyberCivics was developed as a novel computer science outreach program, designed to introduce diverse groups of talented high school students to hands-on activities that reflect the myriad ways in which computing technologies directly impact their everyday lives. The cyberCivics program integrates hands-on computing experiences with the study of contemporary social and political issues. One such curriculum, focused on electronic voting and was used with a high school AP Government course. Jeanna Matthews and James Owens describe the philosophy behind this approach and give suggestions of how to implement in the classroom. They are pleased with how it reaches a larger, more diverse and more academically prepared group of students. The materials are available at:
www.clarkson.edu/projects/cybercivics.
Listen to these and many more Snipits podcasts at:
http://csta.acm.org/Resources/sub/Podcasts.html
Pat Phillips
Editor, CSTA Voice

I have just returned from the Game Development in Computer Science Education (GDCSE) conference. I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the 10 Electronic Arts Scholars. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft and Electronic Arts in cooperation with ACM and SIGCSE. It was an intense conference and I did learn some interesting things.
* The game industry is now larger than the music industry. It became larger than the movie industry about 4 years ago.
* Making a game can cost 30 million dollars and many years of development.
* There are many different types of games from 2D arcade-style games, to role playing games, to first person shooters, to web-based games, to movement games (like the Wii), to serious games that try to help people change their behavior.
* Game developers need to know about networking, artificial intelligence, machine learning, physics, parallel programming, and more. Games also need artistic and creative people who can create compelling and fun experiences.
* I was glad to see more women and minorities than I had expected, but still the majority of the attendees were white males.
Some of the ways people are using games in CS education:
* as a few assignments in introductory computing courses. Kelvin Sung
* as a context for early computing courses or AI courses. Wanda Dann, Alice Project, Douglas Blank
* as a platform for learning computing concepts by having the students play games Tiffany Barnes
* as a course on game design for non-majors to try to draw them into computing Dianna Xu, Jim Whitehead
* as a degree program centered on games Michael Zyda and DigiPen
* using the flight simulator 3D world as the basis to improve global STEM education David Gibson
Overall, many of the talks were about fairly new initiatives with little evaluation. Many of the talks expect to offer more results in the following year. Some of the results that I found interesting were:
* Students didn’t like doing just the hard back-end of a game Kelvin Sung. They want to be creative and not just program. Kevin Bierre
* Some students were discouraged because creating games is much harder, time consuming, and more tedious than they thought. Women are much less likely to want to make first person shooter games than men. Dianna Xu
* Some students are highly motivated by the context and come early and have to be thrown out to make room for the next class. This context appeals more to men (80%) than to women (20%). Jim Whitehead
In summary, it seems that games can serve as a context for some computing courses. Games courses and degree programs can attract more students to computing courses. But, one concern is that women are not as attracted to this context as men. There was a call for the creation of a game platform that was easier to use for computing education purposes.
For more information on this conference see https://www.msadgd08.net/Main.aspx.
Barb Ericson
CSTA Board Member

Medical shows and Crime Scene investigations have sparked students imaginations. They imagine themselves as criminologists solving crimes and doctors saving lives, both rewarding and important careers with an expectation of job satisfaction.
Computer scientists often get to work in similar fields. In fact, much of the high tech equipment used by both doctors and criminologists was developed with the help of a computer scientist.
In my time here at Carnegie Mellon University as a visiting lecturer I have had the opportunity to see computer scientists work on robotic surgeons A Miniature Mobile Robot for Precise and Stable Access to the Beating Heart), and using human computation in order to help computers make more books available to more people through the Internet Archive recaptcha.
I recently came across a website called Computing Life published by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. This publication focuses on highlighting the ways in which scientists use computers to increase our understanding of the human body, medicine and a variety of other topics. Take a look! Go and talk to you science teacher about a collaborative project – what can you help your school’s students model?
If you have any great resources, or any collaborative projects you have done along these lines, comment here and share!
Leigh Sudol
CSTA Communications Chair

There has been quite a bit of discussion about the article by Dewar and Schonberg
http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/CrossTalk/2008/01/0801DewarSchonberg.html
claiming that:
“It is our view that Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in part responsible for this decline.”
In http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/3722876 Dewar clarifies that it isn’t Java that he blames so much as the “use of the Java’s graphical libraries lets students cobble together code without understanding the underlying source code.”
The only evidence of these claims is that they see a decrease in performance in their systems and architecture classes. They also have trouble recruiting qualified applicants who have the right foundational skills for their Ada programming company that develops mission critical software.
The biggest flaw in the article is the lack of evidence supporting the claims. How many people fail the systems and architecture classes now compared to when C++ or C was used as the introduction language? Is this a problem just at their schools or nationwide? If the introductory courses switched to Java and the follow on courses never changed to introduce concepts no longer covered in the introduction course (like pointers) then of course more people will fail. It is likely that using C or C++ in the intro course just caused more people to fail and quit after the first course instead of later. Perhaps the systems and architecture courses are being taught poorly. At Georgia Tech we found that student performance improved in low-level systems types courses when we used the context of programming for a game boy. Students today don’t find low-level systems programming as interesting as they did 20 years ago, when computers weren’t capable of much.
I am not surprised that they have trouble finding people who know Ada. It certainly peaked many years ago in terms of popularity. I also don’t find it compelling that they want people to have more low level skills since the biggest growth is in jobs that have higher level skills (like software engineers).
One of the reasons Java is a popular language in industry is because you don’t have to build everything from scratch. Good software engineers need to know how to reuse existing classes and how to design classes that can be reused. Why should students have to build their own graphics primitives instead of using the Java graphics classes? What learning do they miss out on by not doing this?
When I first took a 3D graphics course we had to develop the algorithm for drawing a line. As students we found this a boring and tedious task since even at that time all the graphics packages had algorithms for drawing a line. I very much doubt that this is required in current 3D graphics courses. Yet, the field of 3D graphics has made huge advances since then. In part we made advances in fields by not reinventing everything.
Dewar in particular claims that the introductory curriculum has been “dumbed down” to make it more fun and appealing. Again, what evidence does he give for this claim? He says that students are not learning formal methods for proving program correctness, but my understanding is that this field which was popular in the 80s has not had much success. He also claims that students don’t have enough knowledge of floating point computation. Again, what proof does he give for the need for this? Students certainly need to be aware of the problems with floating point computation, but very few will go on to do mission critical low-level work.
Our research on learning computing in a context whether it be Media Computation, Matlab, or robotics has shown that it does improve student success and retention. We also have the evidence to back this up, not just at Georgia Tech, but at several other universities and colleges. Just because you make something fun or interesting doesn’t mean you have “dumbed it down” or that students aren’t learning what they need to in order to be successful in a career in computing.
Barb Ericson
CSTA Teacher Educaiton Representative