Changes to CSC110 Computer Science I

We have made a significant change to our Computer Science I course that we are very excited about.  It is currently a four-credit four hour class and our classes run almost full to 32 students per class.  We were concerned because 32 students makes it difficult to get to everyone when we are doing hands on activities, so we have decided to split the course into separate lab and lecture sections in much the same way other science classes are run.  The lecture section will be a normal three-credit three hour class and the lab will be a smaller section (limited to 22 students) containing the hands on work.

In addition, we are creating two versions of the lab: a three hour lab for majors and a two hour lab for non-majors. We hope this will improve things for both student populations.  For non-majors, this will let us focus on the challenges the material provides to students whose skills and focus may not be in this area.  For majors, we are going to use the extra hour to provide a freshman seminar experience including material about potential careers, study skills, college life skills, team building, etc.

This is a big change that was initiated as the result of our assessing the retention and failure rates in CS1 and we are hopeful that we will see significant improvement in both of those measures as a result.

Update on Shirts and Travel

Today, the programming team is creating their "flash" video for the CS Games.  Here they are in their team shirts:

David Abrams, Danielle Leonard, Brian Ettinger, Emily Bruckart, Rob Koch, and David Kelly (not pictured: Jada Williams, Logan Kennedy, and Steve Bussey)

And their team name:  Getting Our Codon!

(look up codon if you don't know what it is . . .)

The department shirts will look like theirs without the special team name on the back.  They are still available if you want one . . .

Programming Team Travel and Department T-Shirts

The Programming Team is traveling a bit further than usual this spring.  They will be going to The CS Games at Concordia University in Montreal.  This event lasts three days and includes a wide variety of competitions.  Nine of our students will be competing as a team led by Dr. Armstrong.  It will be an adventure and I will let you know how it goes.

While we are supporting this trip with moneys from our alumni and the Dean has offered his support as well, not all of the expenses are covered.  The team has designed department T-shirts to raise some money.  Check out the cool designs!  The QR codes take you to are department's web site. White shirts are $10 and red ones are $15.  If you are interested, let me know what to order!

On a side note, Steve Bussey (pictured with the white shirt above), is the member of a jazz band: Jive Turkeys on the Loose.  They will be performing at  McFeely's lounge in the lower level CUB, this Saturday from 9pm to 11pm.  The band will be performing some jazz standards for the first 50 minute set and doing a more impromptu "jam" style performance for the second 50 minute set.  The music will be a mix of  blues, bebop, funk, and ambient styles. 

Tech Support!

Recognizing that our technical support needs are different from the rest of the campus, the university has funded a full-time tech support person for our department's equipment.  In December, we hired Tim Boyum and he is doing an excellent job!  Our server/lab configuration is a complex combination Mac and Linux workstations, three physical servers and 15 virtual machines; all of which share a file space and single log-on capabilities.  Tim has shown an incredible understanding of Kerberos, LDAP, and a bunch of other technologies that I don't begin to understand.

In addition to his technical skills, Tim's demeanor serves him well.  He wants the machines to work well, reacts quickly when something is not working, is very open to suggestions, and has patience in helping all of our students and our faculty.  He is developing a working relationship with campus technical support that will be critical to his success.  

Tim's arrival has allowed Dr. Briggs to return to teaching full time and he has the real-time/embedded students engaged in programming the FPGAs.  We are happy to have his focus returned to our students!  Over the last week, his office has once again been taken over by long conversations with students about research projects and current technology news.

For now, this new position is funded only through the summer, but we are actively working with administration to find ways to convert it to a permanent position.

Google's AI Challenge

Google sponsored an AI challenge this fall.  The goal was to build a player for a game that would beat all other players.  The game was called Planet Wars and ran in a 2-dimensional universe with a random set of planets.  Each player gets 100 member army and the goal is to capture and hold as many planets as possible.  You can see the rules and a demo of the game here.

Over 4600 people from all over the world competed including three of our students:  David Kelly led coming in 1328th.  Emily Bruckart was 1790th and Rob Koch was 1544th.

This is a great example of our students pursuing interesting things on their own.  I had no idea this was going on until David posted his result on FaceBook.  I'm really proud that our students are this engaged.  However, I wish I had been able to compete, too!

Updates . . .

I have been (rightfully) nagged that our news needs updating, so here goes.

As usual, there is (almost) always programming team news.  They have competed in two more competitions recently:  the ACM regionals which are like the rest of our competitions and the IEEE Xtreme competition that lasted 24 hours.  We had two teams compete:  Jessica Burns, Danielle Leonard, and Steve Bussey finished 179 out of 971 teams by finishing 9 of 17 problems. Emily Bruckart, David Kelly, and Logan Kennedy finished 6 problems and cam in 272.  Having competed this year, we'll be more prepared for next year!  And our thanks to Dr. Armstrong for being willing to stay for the entire 24 hours!

We had three teams that competed in the ACM regionals.  Three teams with all of them solving a problem shows great depth in our team; the problems were very hard this year!  Here they are showing off the balloons they earned:

Emily Bruckart, Phil Diffienderfer, and David Kelly

 Jessica Burns, Danielle Leonard, and Steve Bussey

Andrew Bodulow, Garin Dangler, and Greg Battaglia

We have a couple of other projects that are nearing completion:

Our Women in Computer Science team is almost finished with their computer controlled waterfall.  We've been madly plumbing and Dr. Briggs helped us by designing a circuit to connect the processor to the valves.  We may have a dry run (pun intended!) before Christmas break.

We are also developing a video for prospective students.  We're hoping to have it by January.  We'll post it on the website and we're going to burn some to hand out at open houses.  Here's hoping it's as cool as I imagine it can be!

Next time I'm late with a post, feel free to nag. There is ALWAYS something going on!

More Programming Team Success!

This week our programming team competed in two more programming competitions:

Last Thursday was the UD Unnamed Internet Contest 2010 in which we had three teams competing.  The Fairy Queen Princesses (Emily Bruckart, Philip Diffenderfer, and David Kelly) came in second solving six problems and Something Down (Rob Koch) came in third solving five problems. The Hexadecimators (Jimmy Quinn and Stephen Bussey) came in sixth solving four problems which is very impressive since they both are freshmen!  Rumor has it that the winning team (Charlie the Dinosaur from Dickinson) honed their skills by attending a programming team camp last summer.  We will have to work to beat them at regionals!

Friday we competed in a new type of competition:  the IEEE Xtreme programming competition that lasted 24 hours (8 pm Friday to 8 pm Saturday).  Competing against 971 teams from around the world, Jessica Burns, Stephen Bussey, and Danielle Leonard solved nine problems coming in 179th and Emily Bruckart, David Kelly, and Logan Kennedy solved six problems coming in 272nd.  Special thanks go to Dr. Armstrong who supervised for the whole 24 hours!

All of this is great practice for the ACM Regional competition coming up on November 6th.  I'll let you know how well we do!