troductory computing.

the Georgia tech LWc Productivity computer cluster.

 

puting. We have introduced a minor in computer science. We had enough students interested in computing after the media course that we now offer a second course, on data structures within a media context. A second course was also developed for engineering students, so we now teach three second computing courses, as well as three introductory courses.

Faculty in the School of Interactive Computing and the School of Literature, Culture, and Communication (in the College of Liberal Arts) now offer a new joint undergraduate degree, a bachelor of science degree in computational media. The course was developed because of growing common interest in areas like video games, augmented reality, and computer ani-

mations. While the common research interests were clearly the motivating factor in deciding to create the new degree program, having a media computation course that could draw students into the new program from liberal arts, as well as from computing, facilitated the joint effort.

We see an increasing number of courses around campus that require students to write programs, though not necessarily as an outcome of the computing requirement. Computing is growing in importance in all fields. Non-computing faculty request us to include particular concepts or tools in the introductory courses and to provide prerequisite knowledge and skills for advanced courses. In this way, the computing requirement has become part of curricula across campus.

In the first years, the success rates for the new courses were sometimes higher than the success rate in the continuing CS1321. We realized that even computer science majors need introductory courses that connect explicitly to a context that students recognize as computing. In a joint effort with Bryn Mawr College and with funding by Microsoft Research, we launched the Institute for Personal Robotics in Education (IPRE, http:// www.roboteducation.org) to develop a new introductory course that uses robotics as the context for teaching in-

Lessons Learned

We in the College of Computing believe the use of contextualized computing education has been a significant step in making Georgia Tech’s universal computing requirement successful. Developing contextualized courses is challenging and expensive (for example, writing textbooks, developing new integrated development environments), but the results can be shared. Other campuses are adopting our contextualized approaches, and some are developing their own.

We recommend involving faculty from the other departments in building courses for non-major students. They understand their students’ needs in later courses and in their students’ future professions. Further, we need them as context informants as we develop courses that teach through examples from their domains.

Finally, building successful, high-demand courses for non-computing majors gives us a different perspective on the current enrollment crisis. Students want these courses. Other schools on campus want to collaborate with us to build even more contextualized classes. While we still want more majors, we have an immediate need for more faculty time to develop and teach these courses that bring real computing to all students on campus.

photograph by Cindi trainor

Developing
contextualized
courses is challenging
and expensive, but
the results can
be shared.

References

1. bennedsen, J. and Caspersen, m.e. Failure rates in introductory programming. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin 39, 2 (2007), 32–36.

2. Commission on technology, gender, and teacher education. Tech Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age, american association of university Women, 2000.

3. Committee on information technology literacy, national research Council. Being Fluent with Information Technology. the national academies press, 1999.

4. Felleisen, m., Findler, r.b., Flatt, m., and Krishnamurthi, s. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to

Programming and Computing. mit press, 2001.

5. guzdial, m. Introduction to Computing and Programming in Python, A Multimedia Approach. prentice hall, 2005.

6. margolis, J. and Fisher, a. Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. mit press, 2001.

7. shackelford, r.l. Introduction to Computing and Algorithms. addison Wesley, 1997.

8. sloan, r.h. and troy, p. Cs 0.5: a better approach to introductory computer science for majors. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin 40, 1 (2008), 271–275.

9. smith, d.m. Engineering Computation with MATLAB. addison Wesley, 2007.

Mark Guzdial ( [e-mail]) is a professor in the College of Computing at georgia institute of technology in atlanta, ga.

Copyright held by author.