Cs 240-241 Assessment Meeting

CS 240-241 ASSESSMENT COORDINATION MEETING March 10, 2008 MINUTES Present: Hillam, Rich, Salloum, Soroka, Tang Moderator: Soroka TEXT We decided continue with the following text in the year ahead: Michael Main, Data Structures and Other Objects Using Java. Third Edition. Boston: Pearson Addison-Wesley, 2006. isbn 0-321-37525-4 There have been some problems with the author, Michael Main. He doesn’t respond to emails concerning broken URLs in the text. His editor, Michael Hirsch, has not been able to rectify this situation: it’s a good reason to require that textbook URLs refer to the publisher’s site and not to the author’s site. DISCUSSION Students should definitely learn the built-in data structures (Collections) — they will be using them in upper division courses. At one time, CS 241 was dedicated to file structures, but that period has passed. It would be beneficial for students to learn file structures, because large applications such as Google, Amazon, and BroncoDirect keep most of their data in the file system. Salloum has been using material from the following book in order to teach about file systems: Jean-Paul Tremblay and Grant A Cheston, Data Structures and Software Development in an Object Oriented Domain, Java Edition. Prentice Hall, 2003, ISBN: 0-13-787953-9. There’s a feeling that CS 241 has too much material to cover in a single quarter. It was suggested that a few sorting algorithms can be omitted. Soroka expressed a desire to use JUnit to encourage and facilitate students’ testing their own and others’ code. This will be hard to do if we’re not using an IDE. Eclipse seems to be the industry standard. Perhaps one day we can install it in our labs and require students to use it. LEARNING OUTCOMES We added the words “and priority queues” to Learning Outcome 1 of CS 241. It now reads: “Ability to use tree structures and priority queues.”

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