Core Computer Science Courses Research Articles

Gender Diversity in Computer Science at a Large Public R1 Research University: Reporting on a Self-study

With the number of jobs in computer occupations on the rise, there is a greater need for computer science (CS) graduates than ever. At the same time, most CS departments across the country are only seeing 25–30% of women students in their classes, meaning that we are failing to draw interest from a large portion of the population. In this work, we explore the gender gap in CS at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, a large public R1 research university, using three data sets that span thousands of students across six academic years. Specifically, we combine these data sets to study the gender gaps in four core CS courses and explore the correlation of several factors with retention and the impact of these factors on changes to the gender gap as students proceed through the CS courses toward completing the CS major. For example, we find that a significant percentage of women students taking the introductory CS1 course for majors do not intend to major in CS, which may be a contributing factor to a large increase in the gender gap immediately after CS1. This finding implies that part of the retention task is attracting these women students to further explore the major. Results from our study include both novel findings and findings that are consistent with known challenges for increasing gender diversity in CS. In both cases, we provide extensive quantitative data in support of the findings.

Using Phoenix++ MapReduce to introduce undergraduate students to parallel computing

With the release of CS2013, departments around the country are injecting more parallelism into their core computer science courses. MapReduce is an attractive option for introducing undergraduate students to parallelism. However, most approaches to teaching MapReduce require students to access a Hadoop cluster. This is often too costly to be a viable option at many institutions, especially if MapReduce represents a minor topic in a course. In this paper, we discuss the use of Phoenix++ MapReduce for introducing undergraduate students to parallel computing and the MapReduce paradigm. We publish an open-source module on Phoenix++, enabling instructors at other institutions to rapidly adopt Phoenix++ MapReduce for use in their own curricula.

操作系统辅助教学平台的设计与实现

操作系统是计算机专业的一门核心专业课程，具有较强的实验性。由于概念多、涉及面广等因素，往往难以很好地理解和掌握，国内外在操作系统实践教学方面所做了大量研究。本文通过构造一个虚拟操作系统运行环境，试图为学习、设计和研究操作系统提供一个简单、易用的平台，为操作系统的教学工作打下了良好基础。 Operating system is one of the core computer science courses, with a strong experimental feature. It is often difficult to understand and grasp well because the course has many concepts and involves wide aspects of real operating system. A large number of researches have been done in practice teaching of the operating system course at home and abroad. In this paper, we construct a virtual operating system environment to provide a simple, easy to use platform for study, design and research of operating system. The platform has also laid a good foundation for operating system teaching work.

Visual tool for teaching synchronization problems in operating systems

During the last several years, many attempts were made to prove that information technology (IT) holds great promise for education. For that purpose all over world, research has been carried out on the instructional use of IT in education. The results of the research activity have repeatedly proven that computers can be powerful educational tools. Information technology, when properly used, can improve learning, motivate students, and help them gain higher-level cognitive skills critical to lifelong learning. Yet, despite the proven success of instructional computing, it has not yet been fully adopted in meaningful way into computer science education at university level. The paper is about an attempt to use information technology to teach basic concepts in one of the core computer science courses---operating systems---in a modest computing environment.