No, I am not fully aware of what awaits me tonight as I attend my first Pecha Kucha.
However, with the continued help of CS faculty and staff, I know to expect a wonderfully smooth (technically speaking) and exciting experience viewing the presentations of each… presenter.
See this link for more info!
Today, I saw in my google reader that Standford is offering its iPhone development class for free on iTunesU. Anyone can log on, follow along with the class, and learn how to program for free! So I logged on to iTunes, and found that many other colleges also offer their classes free.
I can take a Java class at Cornell, or a Machine learning class at MIT. The professors upload the homework assignments that they hand out in class, so the people following at home can do them. While you might not get “college credit” for the class, you get valuable knowledge from great professors.
Here is my challenge to the College of Charleston and the Computer Science department specifically. Step up with the big boys like MIT, Stanford, and Duke. Before I graduate in 2010, I would love to see a College of Charleston Computer Science class offered for free on iTunes. I believe we have great professors at CofC, so let’s show them to the world.
This video offers a fun look into just a portion of the capabilities of computer scientists.
Each month I receive a newsletter from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. This month’s newsletter mentioned Ada Lovelace Day. Although I am not a blogger, (in fact this is my first blog entry ever) I immediately sent an email out to the CofC students and staff and took a pledge to participate. I was excited because I knew exactly whom I had in mind to write about…
Recently I read the book, The Last Lecture, written by Randy Pausch. I received it as a birthday gift from my friend, Ellie, who knows that I love to read and thought it was perfect for me because of Pausch’s computer science background and especially because he was one of the originators of the Alice Project at Carnegie Mellon. Ellie is aware of my obsession with Alice because we baby-sit the same six-year-old girl that I have gotten hooked on Alice. She constantly begs to play that “Alice computer learning game thing” whenever we go over. Although she still needs a little help with it, she has so much fun and even learns concepts such as loops with my help.
I think our department should require all professors and students to read
The Last Lecture. Everyone can benefit from Randy Pausch’s story and advice whether they are young or old, a professional or a student, a computer scientist or not. I always circle, underline, highlight, and make notes in all of my books. Usually there is a note every couple of pages… a string of words that stands out to me or maybe a thought that I like. In my copy of the last lecture, I have marked up almost every page! Chapter 27, The Promise Land, is only three pages long, and on those pages I have a total of 8 stars, 1 heart, 1 circle, 7 underlines, and 2 strings of sentences highlighted. This chapter is about the Alice program, which for me was so exciting! No, Alice is not my woman in technology pick for Ada Lovelace day… it is the only other female mentioned in this chapter, Caitlin Kelleher.
I immediately identified with and was greatly inspired by Kelleher. Even after reading such a touching and inspiring book, I was just as equally inspired by this woman mentioned just briefly.
After thinking back on my experience in computer science, I wish I had had the opportunity to use a program such as
Storytelling Alice that Kelleher created as part of her doctoral work in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. She has described Storytelling Alice as “a programming environment that introduces middle school girls to computer programming as a means to the end of creating 3D animated stories,” in the paper Storytelling Alice Motivates Middle School Girls to Learn Computer Programming. Dr. Kelleher is currently a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
My first computer class was not until my sophomore year of college. Needless to say I felt inferior to the other boys in the class, some who have been programming since they were about six years old (Hopefully when the girl I baby sit is a CS major, she will be able to say the same thing because of me!). There was a computer programming class at our high school, but I wasn’t even aware of it until after I graduated. Even if I had known about it, as I’ve heard, there’s nothing really exciting about it. Looking back at middle school, we were not required to take any technology classes and I doubt there were any offered. In elementary school, my favorite time of the week was when we went to the computer lab where we created stories and made books using a program where you pick your background and stamp your characters and objects on top. Afterwards, we would write text in the bottom section to create the story and then print it, bind it, color it, and take it home to our parents. Because of my past and my interests, you can see why I am obsessed with the idea of Alice and Alice Storytelling. It’s so similar to what I enjoyed so much as a child but takes it a step further allowing animation and actually teaching you CS concepts!
I have a younger sister in high school now, so I can see how obviously technology is being incorporated into the classroom more and more each day. Although this is great, I have still not seen a change in actively motivating students to take actual programming classes. I’m so grateful for Caitlin Kelleher’s work and progress in this area because it gives girls and even boys a gateway into the field of technology and a new way of thinking. The only reason I was able to realize I liked computer science was because my mom (also in the computer science field) mentioned trying out a class to see if I liked it. If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t have realized I enjoyed it so much; it never really crossed my mind as an option. I don’t want this to be a reason that girls aren’t interested in technology… just because they don’t know or think about computer science as an option, and Kelleher has taken strides in avoiding this from happening. Computer science is fun, and we just need girls to see that at an earlier age and to show them that it is an option! As Randy Pausch stated, “Through Alice, millions of kids are going to have incredible fun while learning something hard. They’ll develop skills that could help them achieve their dreams.”
So thank you Caitlin Kelleher, for whom this post is dedicated, because your vision is inspiring others and allowing them to dream.
Link to the Ada Lovelace Day pledge:
http://www.pledgebank.com/AdaLovelaceDay
Computer Science at the College of Charleston will be…
–Add a comment to share your visions!–
CLforJava:
What:
A multi-year, capstone project to create a product combining two powerful programming languages: Java and Common Lisp. Java is routinely used in most industries. Evolved from AI research, Common Lisp encourages people to think differently about highly complex problems such as bioinformatics, airline reservations, cell phone billing, Web 3.0, and space station maintenance.
This marriage creates a software meta-tool enabling people to build new tools for tackling the current and future hyper-complex problems.
Outcomes:
Over 6 years, approximately 150 students have experienced working in an open-source project as large, complex and intense as they will encounter in industry. They must learn to integrate all of the skills they have learned, as a combination of the sciences and liberal arts, thereby stimulating the critical thinking skills they will require to succeed in their careers. The final product may place the College on the map of the Open Source software community.
In celebration of the project, look for balloons with blurbs – in the halls of the CS Department! Also, don’t forget that on Tuesday, March 17, Jerry Boetje (project developer) will be speaking about the project at the ACM meeting: JC Long Room 221, at 12:15pm.
Wow! What an impressive showing of the CS family from the College of Charleston this year at the SIGCSE Conference. ACM SIGCSE, Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education, celebrated its 40th Anniversary with an audience of four of our faculty and five of our students in Chattanooga, TN. The faculty: Bill Manaris, Renee McCauley, Semmy Purewal and myself (RoxAnn Stalvey), all had active roles in the conference. The five students: Bobby Goodrich, James Goodrich, Katherine Gumps, Will Shiver and Jesse Snider, acted as student volunteers during the conference while attending regular conference sessions. This was such a fabulous experience for each of us. Many are very interested in hearing student and faculty feedback about the conference so please post here. SIGCSE 2010 will be held next year from March 10 – 13 in Milwaukee. Students should begin thinking now about how they can become involved.
This month, thousands of high school students across South Carolina are agonizing over which college to attend in Fall 09. In addition to the CofC many of these students have also been accepted to S. Carolina, Clemson, Elon, UNC Chapel Hill, Furman, and many others. What advice would you give to a high school student about computer science at the College?
- Chris Starr
Computer science faculty members and students continue to contribute to open source projects. A long series of open source experiences have involved students, starting in the previous century with the Mozilla Calendar project under the direction of Dr. Paul Buhler. Since then, three additional open source projects have links to computer science at the College of Charleston include CIRDLES, under the direction of Dr. Jim Bowring, Blobber, led by Brian Muller with involvement of Dr. Semmy Purewal and many others in CSCLUG.org, CLforJava, under the direction of Prof. Jerry Boetje and some new Pecha Kucha social software by Semmy Purewal and Clay McCauley (soon to be released). All but the Mozilla project originated at the College or have roots here through one or more developers.
Do students appreciate the value of working on a relatively large, multi-year software project that involves a sizable code base, version control, bug reporting, coder reading, teamwork, and a suite of other software engineering tools and processes? Is the open source experience contributing a valued learning experience for undergraduates in Computer Science at the CofC?
Note: March 2009 is CLforJava month, in celebration of the contributions of more than 150 CofC, computer science majors to the implementation of Common List in Java. Prof. Boetje plans to release CLforJava at the 2009 International LISP Conference under an open source license.
(cons ‘This (cons ‘is (cons ‘the (50th anniversary of LISP))))
-Chris Starr
For those of you who have never stumbled on this site before, it just contains math problems that you need a computer to solve. I’ve been working myself on doing some of these problems in python, though they can be done in any language.
Right now there are ~250 problems up on the site, and as I was thinking it would be a cool idea to get some people together to go at some of these problems. Maybe even submit answers to all 250?
Here is an example of the 1st problem:
If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
.. and my code in Python to solve it:
total = 0; for i in range(0,1000): if ((i%3 ==0) or (i%5 ==0)): total = total + i; print total;
At any rate — I’ve solved the first 10 & #215. They are a lot of fun, so check it out! If you wanted to look at any of the code for mine, just drop me a line @ bvgiarro@edisto.cofc.edu or comment on this post.
Link: [ProjectEuler.net]
-Brian Giarrocco
