NSF Proposal Ideas

CRCD

Enhancements to CIMEL

Analyze exercises data from CSE12-15 students– Where an exercise had overall poor results,

revise exercise or multimedia– Visualization of results for both instructor and

student

Revise/enhance misconceptions (esp. those significant for women/minorities)

Enhancements to CIMEL

Add collaborative exercises– All exercises currently done by student alone;

design exercises that must be done by two or more students (examples: UML, system design)

– Encourage students to work together, develop relationships that continue in other classes

– Collaboration important to women (CMU research by Fisher 1997, Margolis 2002)

Collaboration ToolEnhancements

New extensions to get students answers faster, encourage collaboration among students– FAQ database search for answer first; automatic

update of FAQ database– Students can ask question privately or publicly

(another student can answer)– BBS-style interface to encourage student

discussion

Curriculum Enhancements

Pair programming– Research documents effectiveness in introductory

programming courses (Baheti 2002, McDowell 2002)

– Encourages collaboration (counter image of lone programmer)

Curriculum Enhancements

Interdisciplinary courses/projects– “Caring about connections,” Margolis 1999;

women’s interest in computer science often connected to particular problems or applications

– Develop connections with fields other than business (biology, other sciences, humanities) through individual courses, independent research opportunities in other disciplines

Curriculum Enhancements

Promote new teaching techniques, non-lecture approaches– Demonstrations, simulations– In-class activities– Inquiry-based learning– Instructor enthusiasm

NSF Proposal Ideas

ITWF

Distance Education

Use multimedia to reach students who have difficulty coming to campus (disabled students)

Distributed pair programming (Baheti 2002)

K-12 Outreach

Develop programs for middle and high school students (especially females and minorities)

Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Add intelligence to multimedia, or develop new training software for teaching programming

Possible collaboration with CHI systems (ITS development company in Fort Washington, PA)

Other ideas

Interdisciplinary studies, increased collaboration also applicable to ITWF

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References

Jane Margolis and Fisher, A. Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2002.

Carnegie Mellon Project on Gender and Computer Science. http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gendergap/

Baheti, P., Williams, L., Gehringer, E., Stotts, T. Exploring Pair Programming in Distributed Object-Oriented Team Projects. North Carolina State University, 2002.

McDowell, C. and Werner, L. The Effects of Pair-Programming on Performance in a Introductory Programming Course. SIGSCE 2002.