Conference Attendance SIGCSE 2015 - Day 1 Morning

It is colder here in Kansas City.  Fortunately, I will only be outside briefly.  Most often I will be networking and continuing my efforts to both become a better teacher, as well as finding an academic job teaching.

This morning, I am focusing on the "Curriculum" track.  I am excited by the three papers in this track, the first looks at research, the second is on systems courses, and the last on parallel computing courses.  Alas, I was in the hallway track and missed the first work.  Perhaps I can find the authors later.

Backward Design: An Integrated Approach to a Systems Curriculum
The goal of systems is "higher level software creation".  Computer Science courses are split into Core Tier 1 and Tier 2 (a term from the ACM 2013 curriculum), where the former are taken by all CS majors and the later are only taken by most or some.  One issue in the old curriculum was that OS also taught C.  In crafting a new curriculum, first establish a vision statement, which can be used in conflict resolution (and also revised).  Establish SMART objectives to prepare and build the assessments.  The results can be found on github.

A Module-based Approach to Adopting the 2013 ACM Curricular Recommendations on Parallel Computing
Parallel computing is important and important for CS graduates to know.  The 2013 ACM Curriculum increased the number of hours that students should take in parallel computing.  Part of the recommendations are to place parallel computing into the curriculum and not just as a course.  Thus parallelism modules are placed throughout the curriculum (perhaps as early as CS1 or CS2).  Find the level of abstraction for a concept and introduce it appropriately.  For example, Amdahl's Law in CS1 versus cache coherence in senior-level class.  5 modules of parallelism were established, which have equivalences with the ACM.  Each course in the curriculum may have 1 or more modules, which then teaches and reinforces the topics.  Even after adding these modules, there has continued to be incremental development and revisions, which have improved student outcomes.  The key take away is that it is possible to introduce these recommendations without completely rewriting the curriculum.

In the afternoon, I will be standing with my poster -  Using Active Learning Techniques in Mixed Undergraduate / Graduate Courses.  Later I will post updates from my afternoon.