Front Door

The Grinnell Mathematics and Computer Science department has made a committment to broadening the scope and appeal of our introductory courses by incorporating algorithimic examples based on ideas from multimedia and hypermedia. Multimedia and hypermedia have brought many more people to computing, and have shown many people that computers are easy to use. By using multimedia-based examples in our introductory courses, we can continue to emphasize algorithms while making them more interesting to a wider variety of students. This is particularly true for students from outside the sciences who are frequently daunted by the scientific and text-processing examples that still dominate many introductory courses and texts.

The intent of this independent study is to develop appropriate multimedia-based exercises, supporting libraries, and laboratory manuals for our introductory Computer Science courses, including CS103, CS151, CS152, and CS153. As the courses are for beginning students, the exercises and libraries should be well designed and as error-free as we can make them. Along the way, we'll consider the purpose(s) of the introductory courses and the role(s) of multimedia and hypermedia in a computer science education and a liberal arts education.

The members of the project team will be required to

• Attend weekly meetings (to be scheduled, approximately one hour per week). We may have different meeeting times for different subgroups.
• Turn in weekly reports on their progress.
• Spend five hours (2 credits) or ten hours (4 credits) per week on work for the class (outside of meeting time).
• Present results in some meetings. For example, a student might be required to learn VideoScheme one week, and teach the remainder of the group the following week. Similarly, a student might be asked to report on educational implications of hypertext to the group at large.

How will students spend their time outside of meetings each week?

• Learning and researching topics
  • The multimedia components of Java.
  • Learning VideoScheme.
  • Perspectives on Computer Science Education.
  • Perspectives on Multimedia in Education.
• Developing and writing appropriate materials.
  • Multimedia-based exercises.
  • Support libraries for these exercises.
  • Laboratory materials.
  • Position papers.
  • Survey papers.
• Critiquing and using these materials.
  • Testing exercises.
  • Commenting on papers.
  • Evaluating exercises through testing on other students.
  • ...
• Other tasks as appropriate.

Students taking this independent study are expected to be highly self-motivated and self-directed. In effect, they will develop their own "assignments" and "readings". They will also be expected to help each other as problems arise.

If you're interested in this independent study, please send email to rebelsky@math.grin.edu