Assigning the development of a poker-playing agent as a group project allows flexibility with respect to the topics and techniques typically covered in an introductory Artificial Intelligence course. A poker agent project also provides students the ...

An undergraduate elective course in data mining provides a strong opportunity for students to learn research skills, practice data structures, and enhance their understanding of algorithms. I have developed a data mining course built around the idea of ...

A hands-on embedded computing project is introduced into an undergraduate social sciences course. In the pilot module, nine student teams created working prototypes, using the technology to address social, ecological and ethical issues. The teams ...

Case-based analysis is a bottom-up methodology for ethical reasoning. In a teaching environment, it can be a useful alternative to top-down methods, such as Kantianism, utilitarianism, rights-based theories, and virtue ethics. We describe a methodology ...

Many incoming college freshmen have accumulated a significant number of hours of experience playing computer games. Extending that experience to actual game creation activities can be highly motivational for these students. Most of these activities ...

The University of North Texas has for many years offered classes in game programming to Computer Science students and classes in game art and design to art students. A key feature of these classes is the opportunity for these diverse communities of ...

Introductory programming courses have a specific set of expected outcomes. One of the most often heard complaints in such courses is that they are divorced from the reality of application. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find areas for application ...

What measurable effect do the language and paradigm used in early programming classes have on novice programmers' ability to do design? This work investigates the question by using data collected from 136 "first competency" students as part of a multi-...

We argue that the failure to separate the concerns in CS1 is the leading cause of difficulty in teaching OOP in the first year. We show how the concerns can be detangled and present a detailed reorganization of contents for CS1/CS2 with CS1 exposing ...

Teaching introductory programming today presents considerable challenges, which traditional techniques do not properly address. Students start with a wide variety of backgrounds and prior computing experience; to retain their attention it is useful to ...

This paper discusses a template-based approach to aid in introducing the upper-division undergraduate (or first year graduate) to the rapidly emerging message passing parallel computing paradigm. Our template library facilitates an accelerated MPI ...

Any deterministic algorithm can be viewed as a game between the algorithm player and the input player. A randomized algorithm can be viewed as a mixed strategy for the first player, used to minimize the disadvantage of being the first to reveal its ...

This paper tracks the five-year growth and current trajectory of a computational outreach program at a small, liberal-arts college. The program has enhanced opportunities for talented high-school students to experience computation more deeply than their ...

This paper describes Scavenger Hunt, a team-based orientation activity for incoming freshmen in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Like many large research universities, Illinois has struggled with the ...

For forty years programming has been the foundation of introductory computer science. Despite exponential increases in computational power during this period, examples used in introductory courses have remained largely unchanged. The incredible growth ...

One of a Software Engineer's most important skills is the ability to define the scope of the problem and ascertain the requirements from general and vague specifications. Teaching this skill is known to be difficult and is made more complex because ...

This paper describes an initiative at North Carolina State University in which the undergraduate software engineering class was restructured in layout and in presentation. The change was made from a lecture-based coursed that followed the waterfall ...