Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Thursday, April 2, 2015, Professor Walker and his student development team will discuss on-going work on the infrastructure and curriculum for CSC 161.

Context: On Friday, April 10, students, Vasilisa Bashlovkina, Anita DeWitt, Nicholas Knoebber, and Anqing (Jason) Liu — with Professor Walker, will be presenting a talk to the Central Plains Regional Conference of the Consortium for Computer Science in Colleges. This presentation will serve as a preliminary offering of that talk.

Abstract: Since 2011, a student-faculty team at Grinnell College has developed and refined a complete course package, called MyroC, comprising a C-based infrastructure, course materials, laboratory exercises, problem sets, projects, etc. for introductory computer science. Using a lab-based pedagogy, the course emphasizes imperative problem solving and utilizes the control of robots as an integrative application theme. Although this approach has had much success, on-going technical challenges have included the lack of portability, unintuitive image processing, and forced sequential processing of robot commands. This paper describes improvements to both the C library and course materials (e.g., examples, laboratory exercises, and projects) that enhance student learning through laboratory experiences. Refinements have focused upon transforming the infrastructure from an extensive, largely non-portable C++ package to a simple C environment, allowing users to work with images directly as 2D arrays of pixels, non-blocking alternatives for many robot-motion commands, and concurrent control for the movement of multiple robots. The paper also describes assessment of effectiveness, including student reactions and enrollment statistics. Finally, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of student-faculty collaboration in course development.

Scheduling Details: Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817), and the talk will begin at 4:30. Everyone is welcome to attend!