Pervasive Parallel And Distributed Computing In A Liberal Arts College Curriculum

We present a model for incorporating parallel and distributed computing (PDC) throughout an undergraduate CS curriculum. Our curriculum is designed to introduce students early to parallel and distributed computing topics and to expose students to these topics repeatedly in the context of a wide variety of CS courses. The key to our approach is the development of a required intermediate-level course that serves as a introduction to computer systems and parallel computing. It serves as a requirement for every CS major and minor and is a prerequisite to upper-level courses that expand on parallel and distributed computing topics in different contexts. With the addition of this new course, we are able to easily make room in upper-level courses to add and expand parallel and distributed computing topics. The goal of our curricular design is to ensure that every graduating CS major has exposure to parallel and distributed computing, with both a breadth and depth of coverage. Our curriculum is particularly designed for the constraints of a small liberal arts college, however, much of its ideas and its design are applicable to any undergraduate CS curriculum

Visual and Textual Programming Languages: A Systematic Review of the Literature

It is well documented, and has been the topic of much research, that Computer Science courses tend to have higher than average drop out rates at third level. This is a problem that needs to be addressed with urgency but also caution. The required number of Computer Science graduates is growing every year but the number of graduates is not meeting this demand and one way that this problem can be alleviated is to encourage students at an early age towards studying Computer Science courses. This paper presents a systematic literature review on the role of visual and textual programming languages when learning to program, particularly as a first programming language. The approach is systematic, in that a structured search of electronic resources has been conducted, and the results are presented and quantitatively analysed. This study will give insight into whether or not the current approaches to teaching young learners programming are viable, and examines what we can do to increase the interest and retention of these students as they progress through their education.Comment: 18 pages (including 2 bibliography pages), 3 figure

Pedagogical Possibilities for the 2048 Puzzle Game

In this paper, we describe an engaging puzzle game called 2048 and outline a variety of exercises that can leverage the game’s popularity to engage student interest, reinforce core CS concepts, and excite student curiosity towards undergraduate research. Exercises range in difficulty from CS1-level exercises suitable for exercising and assessing 1D and 2D array skills to empirical undergraduate research in Monte Carlo Tree Search methods and skilled heuristic evaluation design

Developmental Robots - A New Paradigm

It has been proved to be extremely challenging for humans to program a robot to such a sufficient degree that it acts properly in a typical unknown human environment. This is especially true for a humanoid robot due to the very large number of redundant degrees of freedom and a large number of sensors that are required for a humanoid to work safely and effectively in the human environment. How can we address this fundamental problem? Motivated by human mental development from infancy to adulthood, we present a theory, an architecture, and some experimental results showing how to enable a robot to develop its mind automatically, through online, real time interactions with its environment. Humans mentally “raise” the robot through “robot sitting” and “robot schools” instead of task-specific robot programming

Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research

A Leveled Examination of Test-Driven Development Acceptance

Test-driven development (TDD) has garnered considerable attention in professional settings and has made some inroads into software engineering and computer science education. A series of leveled experiments were conducted with students in beginning undergraduate programming courses through upper-level undergraduate, graduate, and professional training courses. This paper reports that mature programmers who try TDD are more likely to choose TDD over a similar test-last approach. Additionally this research reveals differences in programmer acceptance of TDD between beginning programmers who were reluctant to adopt TDD and more mature programmers who were more willing to adopt TDD. Attention is given to confounding factors, and future studies aimed at resolving these factors are identified. Finally proposals are made to improve early programmer acceptance of TDD

Two-Language, Two-Paradigm Introductory Computing Curriculum Model and its Implementation

This paper analyzes difficulties with the introduction of object-oriented concepts in introductory computing education and then proposes a two-language, two-paradigm curriculum model that alleviates such difficulties. Our two-language, two-paradigm curriculum model begins with teaching imperative programming using Python programming language, continues with teaching object-oriented computing using Java, and concludes with teaching object-oriented data structures with Java