CS Students Research Articles

The university perspective

This panel discusses the granting of credit for AP CS by colleges and universities. Particularly with the change of the AP CS exam from Pascal to C++ last year, this panel is aimed both the collegiate and high school communities who are interested in comments from schools who have experience with AP CS students. Topics will include a short review of the AP curriculum, and some examples of what credit is given, how AP CS students are placed, and how the students perform in those and subsequent courses.

Advising incoming CS students for what lies ahead

In the mid 1980's freshmen at two universities were surveyed and their responses about computer science courses were compared with their responses about other freshmen coursesstudents were more lik...

An interactive lab environment for computing concepts and courseware

This paper describes a new system which is being designed and implemented by senior and graduate Computer Science students, under faculty supervision, to help younger CS students understand and visualize the new computing concepts with which they are in constant struggle. Broadly speaking, the system is to achieve two major goals at the same time : first to provide senior CS students and fresh graduates with the opportunity to develop educational software for junior fellow students in their major using new technology; and second to make the junior ones (freshmen and sophomore levels) experience the new revolution in education of which they will soon become a part while they learn new concepts in their discipline.

Why do fools fall into infinite loops

One effective way to introduce a dose of humanity, acknowledge the needs and struggles of CS1 students, and appeal to a broader range of learning styles is to present a computer science topic in an entertaining manner, e.g., with some form of artistic performance. In this paper, I describe three songs for CS1 that are designed to help students surmount three of the most difficult hurdles of that course. Empirical and anecdotal results demonstrate that the songs help students learn, and help them enjoy learning. These songs are a case study in entertainment; all instructors can find some way to entertain their class, and recordings of the songs themselves are available on the web for any instructor or student.

A controlled experiment to assess the benefits of procedure argument type checking

Type checking is considered an important mechanism for detecting programming errors, especially interface errors. This report describes an experiment to assess the defect-detection capabilities of static, intermodule type checking. The experiment uses ANSI C and Kernighan & Ritchie (K&R) C. The relevant difference is that the ANSI C compiler checks module interfaces (i.e., the parameter lists calls to external functions), whereas K&R C does not. The experiment employs a counterbalanced design in which each of the 40 subjects, most of them CS PhD students, writes two nontrivial programs that interface with a complex library (Motif). Each subject writes one program in ANSI C and one in K&R C. The input to each compiler run is saved and manually analyzed for defects. Results indicate that delivered ANSI C programs contain significantly fewer interface defects than delivered K&R C programs. Furthermore, after subjects have gained some familiarity with the interface they are using, ANSI C programmers remove defects faster and are more productive (measured in both delivery time and functionality implemented).

A system for program visualization in the classroom

This paper describes the use of a system which will allow effortless visualization and animation of standard C/C++ programs. The system brings alive programs so that students in CS 1 and CS 2 classes can more easily see each instruction and its effects. They can also see the effects of larger entities such as functions. The system serves as an excellent instructional tool and debugger.

Chance-It

Most people enjoy playing games. Most CS-1 students will enjoy a final project that involves computational game-playing. Chance-It is a simple two-person dice game with many possible strategies at varying levels of sophistication and complexity. These features make the problem of formalizing and encoding a strategy to play Chance-It an interesting final project for CS-1.This paper describes an object-oriented final project for CS-1 in which students build Player1 and Player2 classes to play Chance-It. A ChanceItGame class and driver are provided to coordinate the interactions of these classes. The project provides students with an enjoyable introduction to object-oriented design and the problem of formalizing and codifying human strategy in software. Examples are given in C++, but convert easily to Java.

Applying the personal software process in CS1

The authors conducted an experiment in applying components of the Personal Software Process sm (PSP) described in Humphrey[2,3] to a large group of CS1 students. Half of the students were taught selected PSP principles and the other half were asked only to keep track of total time spent on programming assignments. Results indicate that PSP is of value not only to software professionals involved in large projects, or to students in a software engineering school, but also to novices at the CS1 level, regardless of their background.

CS student research experience applied to developing instructional technology

CS undergraduate research in a cooperative development effort is described. Significant experience in current technology was gained by creating an instructional unit. CS students directly applied research skills, and measured learning effectiveness in a controlled study. The work includes research, application, evaluation, model for future work, and presentation. It also provided a learning aid for general students, an interactive tutorial on elementary gate-level logic. JavaScript and HTML were used to rapidly develop this prototype. It was student-tested by student researchers, and served several objectives in a computer science course. Data on student performance was collected and analyzed. Positive results were obtained, indicating a model for further development.

So how are your hands? Thoughts from a CS student with RSI

So how are your hands? Thoughts from a CS student with RSI

Object-centered design

With Pascal waning in popularity as the CS1 language of choice, many colleges and universities are considering the adoption of C++ (an imperative and object-oriented hybrid language) as its replacement. An important issue that must be addressed in making such a change is the question of what software design methodology should be taught to CS1 students. Two common answers are (i) continue teaching structured design in CS1 and switch to object-oriented design in CS2; or (ii) teach object-oriented design from the outset in CS1. We believe that both of these approaches have significant drawbacks. To avoid these drawbacks, this paper describes a graduated approach to object-oriented design that we call object-centered design . The approach introduces students to object-oriented design by the end of CS2 without an abrupt paradigm shift, and without requiring an early introduction of inheritance.

Social responsibility and the CS student

Social responsibility and the CS student

CSI closed lab vs. open lab experiment

Recommendations of the ACM/IEEE Joint Curriculum Task Force on the Core of Computer Science and the dissatisfaction with the poor performance of too many CS1 students at Middle Tennessee State University combined to motivate the Computer Science Department to compare the use of closed labs and open labs. A controlled experiment was conducted in the Fall 1992 and Spring 1993 semester of CS1 classes. Some of these classes were chosen for closed lab and others for open lab experiences. ANOVAs of various comparison groups consistently showed significant differences on comprehensive CS1 exams in favor of the students in closed labs.

Writing about programming in CS1

Students in CS1 were assigned to groups that met during class time to study one member's work on one complex programming problem. When the program was complete, each student wrote a paper describing various aspects of the program. The class response to the writing project was varied and intense.

Using a software engineering approach to CS1

This investigation used two groups of CS1 students. The control group was taught with a more traditional synthesis approach emphasizing language use using bottom-up explanations. The treatment group was taught with a software engineering-oriented analysis approach and emphasized topdown functional decomposition. The results indicate that a software engineering approach can produce significantly better student performance than a more traditional approach.

Ada in CS1

As the use of Ada in commercial programming increases, it becomes more important to make an attempt to introduce it into the curriculum as early as possible. We have taught CS1 successfully using Ada by strictly concentrating on a subset of the language and through the use of a student-oriented package which enables students to begin writing programs in Ada after one lecture. A laboratory of personal computers was found to be adequate for CS1 use and students were able to write up to 2 programs per week in the course.