JCSE Online
April 2003
Editor’s Remarks
J. Philip East
University of Northern Iowa
Good day. I hope this last issue of JCSE Online for this year finds you well. We have four articles and a Standards report for you. I imagine you can find something of value in each of them.
In the first article, George Teston seems to have at least two purposes in mind. He provides substantial background on Moore’s law and argues that it should be included in computer science curricula. The discussion and references should provide resources for doing so. Professor Teston also performed some action research examining differences in student learning under various instructional conditions–producing graphs versus examining graphs, and proportional graphs versus logarithmic graphs. What do you think he found? You will have to read the article to find out.
We are reprinting three articles from the Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS). As I have noted before, there are a number of good regional conferences on computer science education. Many of them are associated with the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges. MICS is not, but it is the one in my area (and, I believe, the oldest such conference). Articles for some of the recent MICS conferences are online if you want to see if there is anything of interest to you. I hope you enjoy these articles.
The first reprinted article is by Rob Faux (pronounced fox). He suggests that encouraging student observation during instruction can be very beneficial. His definition of observation includes both the perception of events and information, and the reflection on the perceptions made. I’m not sure I agree with his definition of observation but I certainly enjoyed his article. I have been planning to sit down and redesign some of my instruction. Now I want to reread and reflect on his article before and while doing so. Though this article is written very much from the college classroom perspective, I think many of the ideas included here are noteworthy for us all. I expect you will find at least one or two that will be meaningful or useful to you.
Read
Tom Gibbons writes about a computer literacy course they recently revised at St. Scholastica. Before revision, the course dealt primarily with problem solving in applications (Excel and Access). They revised the course to include literacy concepts, retain some application work, include Web page authoring, and (for some students) introduce programming. The primary focus of the article is their attempt to make the course more student-centered. They do so by differentiating the course for students with more or less background and interest, providing "team problem solving" activities, and expecting "in-depth self study". As usual, I found things that I would do differently, however, I found a lot of merit to the techniques suggested. I think you will too. (Don’t forget to check his Web site for the labs and study topics. They are very good and should help generate ideas of your own.)
Read
The third reprinted article, by Curt Hill, concerns the use of a MOO or MUD for teaching computing. I had heard of MUDs before, but have never thought of them as being used in instruction and I had no idea what a MOO was (a MUD, Object Oriented). Professor Hill uses a MOO for both motivation and management in some of his programming classes. For me to describe how it works would take too long. A well designed Web site might provide much the same outcome if you do scripting. However, it would probably take more effort, and end up being less fun. I was very intrigued. (Imagine what a visually oriented MOO might look like–I don’t know if that is possible.) This article also contains much discussion of how Curt uses the MOO in his classes. As with most good discussions of teaching, I expect you can get some nice ideas even if you don’t use the MOO.
Read
Our last item in this issue is another one from me. Actually, the work was done by several people, as is noted in the document. For this publication, I merely provided some introductory and background information and rearranged some of the original work. To some extent, I am bragging. I think the work we (ISTE and SIGCS representatives) did was quite good. But that is not my only motive. I hope to communicate some of the ideas and skills considered by many to be important for computer science teachers to have encountered and mastered. I expect you will agree with many of them and disagree with at least some. Keep your disagreements in mind. It won’t be long before we start the next review.
Read
I hope the rest of your school year goes well and you have a good summer. If you can, consider attending the Computer Science and Information Technology Symposium this summer and NECC (end of June in Seattle). Also, we will be producing and distributing a print compendium of this year’s articles. I believe you should receive it sometime in May.
As always, we are very interested in what you think and your experiences. Consider writing for JCSE. Check out the submission guidelines to see the things we are interested in publishing. Have a good day.
Philip East
east@cs.uni.edu
Note: All Web links in this issue were active as of the post date (April 2, 2003). However, the Web is volatile, and neither ISTE nor SIGCS have any control over external sites. Please contact associate editor Davis N. Smith (dsmith@iste.org) if you have a fix for a broken link.
Copyright © 2003, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.
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