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Design Process for a Non-Majors Computing Course Design Process for a Non-majors Computing Course Mark Guzdial Andrea Forte College of Computing/GVU College of Computing/GVU Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Institute of Technology 801 Atlantic Drive 801 Atlantic Drive Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta, Georgia [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT course in computing, including a requirement to learn and There is growing interest in computing courses for non-CS use programming. When that decision was made, the only majors. We have recently built such a course that has met class available was our majors-focused CS1 based on the with positive response. We describe our design process, TeachScheme approach[7], which did not adequately meet which includes involvement of stakeholders and identifying the needs of our liberal arts, architecture, and management a context that facilitates learning. We present evaluation students. The course saw low success rates, and the stu- results on success rates (approximately 90% of the students dents and faculty were vocal in their dissatisfaction. We earn an A, B, or C) and impact of the course on students saw this dissatisfaction as an opportunity to create a new over time (80% report that the class has influenced them course and build toward Alan Perlis’ vision of programming more than a semester later). for all students—as a component of a general, liberal edu- cation [8]. The course that we developed, Introduction to Media Com- Categories and Subject Descriptors putation, is an introduction to computing contextualized K.4 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Infor- around the theme of manipulating and creating media. Stu- mation Sciences Education dents really do program—creating Photoshop-like filters (such ; H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: as generating negative and greyscale images), reversing and Multimedia Information Systems splicing sounds, gathering information (like temperature and news headlines) from Web pages, and creating animations. Details on the structure and content of the course are avail- General Terms able elsewhere [20, 11]. Experimentation,Design The purpose of this paper is to use our course as an instance, and abstract from it a design process for a non- Keywords majors introductory computing course and a set of bench- mark evaluation results. Our definition of success is: Multimedia, CS1, CS2, programming, non-majors • Non-CS majors students should have a higher suc- cess rate than in a traditional introductory computing 1. DESIGNINGCOMPUTERSCIENCEFOR course. If we are designing the course explicitly for THE NON-MAJORS that audience, we should be able to satisfy their needs There is growing interest in the creation of computer sci- and meet their interests better than we can in a course ence for non-CS majors. One reason for this increase is the designed for our own majors. recognition that computing now influences every aspect of • The course should have impact beyond the single term. our society, and it is a competitive advantage for students in If the course doesn’t influence how non-major students other majors to know more about computing. A reason for think about computing, and they will only take a single the interest from CS departments is declining enrollment in computing course (probably), then we will have lost the CS major, which inspires CS faculty to look elsewhere our opportunity to influence these students. for customers [6]. At Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), the In this paper, we describe how we designed the Media faculty require that every incoming student must take a Computation course as an example process for designing a non-majors computing course. A sketch of our process follows, and is detailed in the second section of the paper. • Setting objectives: We set objectives for the course Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for based on campus requirements for a computing course, personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are on ACM recommendations, and on the existing com- not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to puter science education research literature about what republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific students find difficult about computer science. permission and/or a fee. • SIGCSE2005 ’05 St. Louis, MO, USA Choosing a context: We selected a context that al- Copyright 200X ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$5.00. lowed us to meet our curricular objectives and that we believed would be motivating to non-major students. the assignments and lectures were relevant to the students’ Having an explicit context helped them understand professional goals within that context. why they should care about computing, which is sig- One implication is that we decided to discuss issues of nificant issue in introductory computing [13]. functional decomposition, how computers work, and even issues of algorithmic complexity and theoretical limits of • Set up feedback process: We sought feedback from fac- computation (e.g., Travelling Salesman and Halting prob- ulty in the majors that we planned to serve, as well as lems), but at the end of the course. During the first ten from students through multiple forums. weeks of the course, the students write programs to manip- • Define infrastructure: An early challenge was to choose ulate media (which they do see as relevant), and they begin the language and programming environment, which to have questions that relate to these more abstract topics. are critical (and sometimes religious) issues. We found “Why are my programs slower than Photoshop?” and “Isn’t that the process of choosing a language for a non- there a faster/better way to write programs like this?” do majors course is as much about culture and politics arise from the students naturally. At the start of the course, as it is about pedagogy. the abstract content is irrelevant (from the students’ per- ception), but at the end of the course, it is quite relevant. • Define the course: Finally, we defined lectures, assign- Opportunities for Creativity: Comments made by female ments, and all the details of what makes up a course. computer science graduates at a recent SIGCSE session on Here our decisions were informed by research in the women in computing suggested they were surprised to find learning sciences [4]. that computer science offered opportunities for creativity— it wasn’t obvious in the first few courses, but was obvious 2. DESIGN PROCESS later [19]. Providing more opportunities for seeing comput- ing as a creative activity in early classes may help improve We detail below each stage of the development process for retention [1]. the Media Computation class. We believe that a similar pro- Making the Experience Social: We wanted students to cess could be used to create other introductory computing see computer science as a social activity, not as the asocial courses targeting non-CS majors. lifestyle stereotypically associated with hackers—a stereo- 2.1 Setting Objectives type which has negatively influenced retention [13]. The Georgia Tech computing course requirements states that the introductory course curriculum has to focus on al- 2.2 Choosing a Context gorithmic thinking and on making choices between different Most introductory computing curricula aim to teach gen- data structures and encodings. There is an explicit require- eralized content and problem-solving skills that can be used ment that students learn to program algorithms being stud- in any programming application. Research in the learning ied. We also wanted to build upon the recommendations in sciences suggests that, indeed, teaching programming tied to Computing Curricula 2001 [2] as a standard for what should a particular domain can lead to students understanding pro- be in a computing introduction, with a “CS1”-level course gramming only in terms of that domain. This is the problem as our target. of transfer [4, 5]. That’s why it’s important to choose a do- We explicitly decided not to prepare these students to be main that is relevant to the students. This is not a problem software developers, but instead, we focused on preparing only with students, though—most software experts only can them to be tool modifiers. We do not envision these stu- program well within domains with which they are familiar dents as professionals ever sitting down to program at a [3]. However, there is strong evidence that without teach- blank screen. Instead, we imagine them modifying others’ ing abstract concepts like programming within a concrete programs, and combining existing programs to create new domain, students may not learn it at all [12]. Contextu- functionality. Based on our discussions with faculty in these alization may offer an important key to improved learning. majors, we realized that these students, as professionals, will By teaching for depth instead of breadth, we can teach more very rarely create a program exceeding 100 lines. The im- transferable knowledge [4]. plications of these assumptions and findings are that much The argument has been made that teaching programming, of the design content and code documentation procedures especially to non-majors, improves general problem-solving that appear in many introductory computing curricula are skills. Empirical studies of this claim have shown that we less relevant for these students than for majors. can’t reasonably expect an increase in general problem-solving We also explicitly chose to use this class to attract stu- skills after just a single course (about all that we might ex- dents currently not being retained within computer science, pect non-majors to take), but transfer of specific problem- especially women. Since our audience was non-majors, they solving skills can happen [17]. Therefore, teaching program- clearly fit into the model of students not choosing computer ming in a context where students might actually use pro- science as a major.
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