2009 CSL Undergraduate Summer Research Stipend Report
Aram Apyan | Evan Estola | Erik Harpstead | Jae Kwan Lee | Ryan McClure | Jesse Reinhardt | Peter Schemmel | Andrew Yates
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Erik Harpstead
Third-year undergraduate, Psychology and Computer Science
Matthew Bauer
Senior Lecturer, Computer Science
RESEARCHING AND REDESIGNING IIT'S CS GENERAL EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS (CS105/ARCH125/CS115)
What should CS 105, Introduction to Computer Programming, accomplish?
Award-winning teacher Mr. Bauer is interested in the answer. Director of CS undergraduate programs and undergraduate academic advising, he is known for answering student emails in record-breaking time—even in the middle of the night—as he helps them explore their options.
Erik came to his attention in CS201, an accelerated introductory class. (Both also shaved their heads for St. Baldrick's Day to raise money for cancer.) A student from Auden Hills, MN, Erik is interested in research, human-technology interaction, and how best to teach people to use computers. He also is treasurer for his fraternity and a disc jockey for radio station WIIT, and he will study in Japan next year.
In CS201, Erik said, "Students are presented with problems and asked to find ways to solve them with minimal handholding and more of a focus on good programming practice than proper syntax." Would some of that approach work better in CS105? With Bauer, he spent the summer researching the question.
They interviewed other departments about computational thinking and problem-solving required for different majors, what upper-level major courses expect from CS general education, "best practices" in each major, and more, and catalogued the results. Working with Bauer's CS495 class, they analyzed the data from the perspective of computer scientists looking for what computational concepts were hidden behind the engineering and mathematics concepts. They also surveyed previous CS105 students and researched introductory classes at other universities and alternative ways to teach computer science to non-majors.
"We concluded that what was in order was a new set of objectives for the course," said Erik, and they plan to roll out a beta version of a new course in Spring 2010, with appropriate data collection to test its effectiveness. They hope their changes will improve the educational experience, support interdisciplinary work, and concentrate on computational thinking and problem-solving, rather than just programming—while also improving the major-specific programming skills.
Download the 2009 Undergraduate Summer Research Stipend report. (1 MB .pdf)
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