Mark Fontenot

In an effort to have a more effective and productive summer 09, I’m going to begin a To-Do list of goals.  Hopefully it will provide some guidance during the summer

• Research what’s known about the following topics on learning to program:
  • Why is learning to program difficult for some students yet simple for others? Is the answer as simple as possessing a talent for programming?  Can anyone learn to program?  What’s the best motivators for learning to program?  Are there any studies that attempt to determine what the best first programming language is?
  • What is the best way to evaluate a programming assignment to aid in a student becoming a better programmer? There are the easy answers such as “does it produce the correct output for a given set of input test cases”.  However, that is far too trivial.  What feedback is most useful to the student?  How useful is it to give a student feedback and allow them to “correct”/refactor their assignment? What part of the review process can be automated and what part needs to be performed by a human (instructor/TA/etc.)? Can evaluation of the “design” be automated?  Can the evaluation of source quality be automated?
• For a standard CS1 course, develop a set of assignments wherein each assignment’s context is a different engineering (or general academic) discipline.  Nearly every engineering student at SMU takes the introductory programming course.  This seems like a prime opportunity to let the students see how CS is used in other disciplines (even basic software development skills). I would envision that each assignment would start with a 1 – 3 page introduction of the discipline and how CS is used in and affects that discipline. This would be followed by some programming challenge of which the context was something from that discipline.
• Develop course work for all Fall 2009 classes:
  • CSE 1341 Honors – Principles of Computer Science I
  • CSE 2341 Honors – Principles of Computer Science II
  • CSE 3358 – Data Structures
• Innovation in/and engineering.  What is known already about this?  Can one learn to be innovative?  Is being an innovative engineering nothing more exercising a collection of other skills in concert to solve a problem?  If so, what are those skills?  If not, but assuming that a certain set of skills is customary, what makes innovation > (skill1 + skill2 + skill3)?

That’ll do for now…