Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Thursday, February 28, Professors Sam Rebelsky, Janet Davis, and Jerod Weinman will discuss the rationale for using media scripting in our introductory computer science course:

Grinnell's CSC 151 draws upon concepts of media computation to motivate students and to provide more visual feedback that helps students better understand the algorithms they write. At the same time, CSC 151 encourages students to think about computing (and image making) in multiple ways. In this talk, a preview of a talk we will give at the SIGCSE Symposium on Computer Science Education, we discuss the inception of the course, what we see as key design points of the course, and the ways in which we have assessed the efficacy of the course. Since the introduction of this new version of 151, we have seen significant increases in enrollment and diversity. Assessments suggest that the course helps students develop deep knowledge that is atypical of an introductory course and also builds confidence.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, “Building knowledge and confidence with mediascripting: a successful interdisciplinary approach to CS1,” will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, January 24, Hart Russell 2014 and Prashanna Tiwaree 2014 will present the results of their summer 2012 research project:

This project sought to replace the MediaScheme console used in CSC 151 with a more versatile system that consists of DrRacket, a Scheme development environment, communicating with the GIMP through D-Bus, an inter-process communication tool that is found in modern Linux systems.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Re-architecturing MediaScheme, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, November 15, Sarah Henney 2013 and Martha Fletcher 2015 will describe their summer internship work on the MediaScheme project:

Self-Disclosing GIMP(SDGimp) is an ongoing project with the goal of adding self-disclosure functionality tailored to the MediaScheme library into the GIMP. In short, SDGimp will allow a user to perform an action in the GIMP and then view the Scheme expression which can be used to duplicate that action.

In this Extra, we will discuss and demonstrate our work from this summer on SDGimp, including our expansion of the MediaScheme library to include more actions from the GIMP.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Self-disclosing GIMP with MediaScript, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!