GPS Tour

One of the teams in our Embedded/Realtime course is gaining some recognition. They are building an application for handheld (Windows CE) devices utilizing a GPS add-on device. The goal is to produce an application that would help perspective students tour campus at their own pace. The admissions office would have a set of handheld devices that they could loan to prospective students and their families. As they walks around campus, the device highlights the buildings that are close by and the user can see information about each building. The team, consisting of Joshua Buzzard, Stephen Nowell, John Yackovich and (recently added) Brian Clarke presented a prototype to University President Dr. Ruud who was quite impressed with the project. They will be continuing development into the Spring when they will present it to the Board of Governors.

Surface Mount Soldering

This week, if MCT 164 is open, check it out! An alum has loaned our Embedded class the equipment necessary to do surface mount soldering. That means that our students can practice mounting chips whose pins do not go through the circuit board. Instead the chip sits on top of the circuit board and the solder joints at the pins also secure the chip to the board. This certainly requires a steady hand as the joints are small enough that a microscope is required to see them as you create them. This is certainly a unique opportunity for those students and we really appreciate Ed Bockhoeffer for loaning the equipment. Check it out!

Department Video

I have been tasked with making a video that we could hand to prospective students that shows them all of the cool stuff we have going on. Last week at FIE, I kept saying, "Boy, we do it better than that!" so I'm sure we have a lot of stuff to show off. Here are the things that I've thought of to include:

• the embedded course projects


• the robotics course projects


• the ACM contest


• some classes working on labs

I would also like some clips of students saying what they think is good about our program. If you're interested in helping, please let me know.

Also, if you have other ideas for things we should showcase or how the video should look (or sound?), I'm open to suggestions. When I was in grad school studying AI, it never occurred to be that this is what I'd be doing!

Traveling, again

This week, Dr. Lee and I have been away at Frontiers in Education (FIE) in Milwaukee. I hate missing a class (though I'm sure they are working on the homework I gave them :) ) and I know that we are getting into scheduling time, so many of you are looking for me this week. From that, you can assume that I think attending this conference is very important. FIE is a conference that is solely focused on engineering education predominantly at the undergraduate level. In the sessions I have visited, I have seen innovations in how CS1 is taught, how team project courses are managed, how students are recruited, and how programs are assessed.

Much of what I have seen shows me how good our programs are. When I talk with people about what we are doing in CS1, they are impressed that our freshman can handle test-driven development. When I talk with people about our WiCS program, they are impressed with the motivation of our students and the quality of the videos and the website. As always, I'm proud of what we are doing.

In addition, I have picked up some ideas about ways to assess our project courses and new ways of looking at grading those courses. I also think that the things I saw about CS1 confirm the direction we are going.

Any way, being away gives me some time to reflect and plan, but I'm looking forward to getting back to campus. If you've been looking for me to talk about scheduling, I promise I'll be around a lot next week!

New WiCS Equipment

This summer, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences bought a new camera and microphone for our WiCS team. As a result, the format of the podcasts has been improved and we're able to look at a whole new set of topics for the videos. Our latest one is on spell checking. Check it out at the WiCS website .

Leaving a comment or emailing the podcast to a friend requires that you create a login for the website. It's easy to do and you might win something, so don't be deterred! The WiCS team would love to hear your comments.

Department Google Calendar

I'm looking for more ways to let everyone know about what's going on in the department. My latest idea is a public Google calendar. I'm going to hook it into the department homepage soon, but, in the mean time, you can see it pretty easily. You need a gmail account (if you don't have one, let me know and I'll give you one). When you've logged onto gmail, you can go to Google calendar. From there, on the left side of the screen, there's a button to add a new calendar. Just search for "Shippensburg University Computer Science Department" which is a public calendar and you'll see everything that's going on!

If you have an event that you'd like me to add to the calendar, just let me know! Which reminds me: when are we having a movie night to watch Tron?

Agile 2007

This week, I've been away at the Agile 2007 Conference and it occurred to me that you might wonder why we go to conferences.

There are three communities that we try to keep in touch with: other educators, people in industry and people doing research in areas similar to ours. Connections with those people help us stay up-to-date and help us innovate in our curriculum, classrooms, and research.

Agile 2007 is a strongly industry-focused conference. Probably 95% of the attendees are associated with developing software from people in the trenches to upper management. It's a great time to see new tools and techniques that teams are using to create high quality software quickly. For me, it confirmed that the content in our Testing and XP course is up-to-date (though I think we'll add continuous integration this spring). It also confirms that my consulting activities are current, though I picked up a few tricks here and there.

Agile 2007 also had an educator's symposium for people to talk about how they are teaching agile methods. It included talks on project courses at other schools and I presented the innovations we have made to CS1 (I've presented our project course to a number of venues in the past). You can see the project I presented on here (Click on TDD in CS1). On this front, we are definitely on the leading edge. People were very surprised that freshmen can master TDD while learning everything else they need to learn in that course. I think a lot of people will be watching the labs develop and using them in their courses, too.

Any way, this conference confirmed that our technology is up-to-date. In October, I'll be heading to Frontiers in Education which is entirely focused on teaching. I'll let you know what I learn.