NSF%20Proposal%20Ideas

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NSF Proposal Ideas

• CRCD

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Enhancements to CIMEL

• Analyze exercises data from CSE12-15 students
• Where an exercise had overall poor results,
  revise exercise or multimedia
• Visualization of results for both instructor and
  student
• Revise/enhance misconceptions (esp. those
  significant for women/minorities)

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Enhancements to CIMEL

• Add collaborative exercises
• All exercises currently done by student alone
  design exercises that must be done by two or more
  students (examples UML, system design)
• Encourage students to work together, develop
  relationships that continue in other classes
• Collaboration important to women (CMU research by
  Fisher 1997, Margolis 2002)

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Collaboration ToolEnhancements

• New extensions to get students answers faster,
  encourage collaboration among students
• FAQ database search for answer first automatic
  update of FAQ database
• Students can ask question privately or publicly
  (another student can answer)
• BBS-style interface to encourage student
  discussion

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Curriculum Enhancements

• Pair programming
• Research documents effectiveness in introductory
  programming courses (Baheti 2002, McDowell 2002)
• Encourages collaboration (counter image of lone
  programmer)

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Curriculum Enhancements

• Interdisciplinary courses/projects
• Caring about connections, Margolis 1999
  womens interest in computer science often
  connected to particular problems or applications
• Develop connections with fields other than
  business (biology, other sciences, humanities)
  through individual courses, independent research
  opportunities in other disciplines

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Curriculum Enhancements

• Promote new teaching techniques, non-lecture
  approaches
• Demonstrations, simulations
• In-class activities
• Inquiry-based learning
• Instructor enthusiasm

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NSF Proposal Ideas

• ITWF

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Distance Education

• Use multimedia to reach students who have
  difficulty coming to campus (disabled students)
• Distributed pair programming (Baheti 2002)

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K-12 Outreach

• Develop programs for middle and high school
  students (especially females and minorities)

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Intelligent Tutoring Systems

• Add intelligence to multimedia, or develop new
  training software for teaching programming
• Possible collaboration with CHI systems (ITS
  development company in Fort Washington, PA)

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Other ideas

• Interdisciplinary studies, increased
  collaboration also applicable to ITWF
• ????

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References

• Jane Margolis and Fisher, A. Unlocking the
  Clubhouse Women in Computing. MIT Press,
  Cambridge MA 2002.
• Carnegie Mellon Project on Gender and Computer
  Science. http//www-2.cs.cmu.edu/gendergap/
• Baheti, P., Williams, L., Gehringer, E., Stotts,
  T. Exploring Pair Programming in Distributed
  Object-Oriented Team Projects. North Carolina
  State University, 2002.
• McDowell, C. and Werner, L. The Effects of
  Pair-Programming on Performance in a Introductory
  Programming Course. SIGSCE 2002.