CS Department Curriculum Conference
I was a member of a conference today on the CS curriculum at GMU. Apparently I was nominated by a faculty member to attend. The conference was about the CS curriculum, especially changes and suggestions.
To quote from the invitation email:
The CS department has a student advisory council for providing feedback to the CS faculty about the CS curriculum, advising, and other issues which are relevant to the CS undergraduates. You have been nominated by your professors to be on this council, and I hope you will agree to serve on it.
Basically, being on this council will involve meeting with the faculty members once a semester, and letting us know what you think is good about the department and the undergraduate curriculum, what is bad, and what can be improved.
It started at 11am and ran until 1:45pm. Of particular interest to me was the discussion of the early classes, especially CS112. CS112 is the first programming class a student at GMU will encounter, and I am a TA for it so I have a bit of “insider” information on it. This semester they switched to Python, instead of the Java they had been using. This was discussed at length.
I was of the opinion that using Python was a bad idea. The next class, CS211, is taught in Java. It is my opinion that the language switch involved was going to throw a lot of students for a loop. They would go into CS211 and be utterly confused.
There was significant discourse on the nature of the lab sessions associated with it. Of particular problem was that the lab sessions weren’t really effective for anything at present. The idea we wrangled out was this: CS lab sessions would have daily quizzes, and be much more in sync with the lecture. The quizzes would be designed to emphasize core concepts that a lot of students are having difficulty with. These are the fundamental building blocks, which they usually don’t have the ability to use. For example, they would be given a chunk of code and told to change it to use a for loop. I think this is a particularly good idea.
The other generally agreed on idea was that some more real-world-applicable subjects or activities would be good, especially in programming. I’m not entirely in agreement with this myself; I’m very much into the science of CS, and think that too many students have too shaky an understanding of the theory involved. Suggestions included having each class spend a few sessions answering real-world-style questions from the students. The idea of having specific classes for specific tools was vetoed, at least. The industry changes too much too fast to make this practical.
They gave us lunch too.