I worry over topics for the syllabus, fretting over demos and presentations. And yet, I always come back to the fact that most of what my students learn and remember from my course comes from the assignments. Great assignments are hard to dream up and time-consuming to develop. With that in mind, the Nifty Assignments session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and concrete materials of successful assignments.

Retaining students in Computer Science may be improved by engaging them in the learning process while preventing them from becoming overly frustrated. While engaging students during lecture is certainly important, most students spend a significant amount of time working on programming projects outside of class. Gaining a deep understanding of student engagement in programming is difficult, since the instructor is seldom present during the process. This paper presents the results of student surveys administered after each programming project for multiple sections of two courses: CS2, and Data Structures and Algorithms. We analyze the data in terms of engagement, frustration and niftiness.

No abstract available.

Attracting and retaining quality students is an ongoing concern in Computer Science. Retention can be enhanced by keeping students engaged in the learning process while preventing them from becoming overly frustrated. While engaging students during class is certainly important, most students spend a significant amount of time working on programming projects outside of class. The goal of this research was to collect and analyze some initial data on how engaging and frustrating our students find our programming projects. During the Spring 2006 semester we surveyed our students after each programming project. This paper presents some initial findings from the surveys and discusses strategies on how to improve our projects based on this feedback.

Many instructors use program runtimes to illustrate and reinforce algorithm complexity concepts. Hardware, operating systems and compilers all influence the runtimes, but generally not to the extent of making the data difficult to interpret. The Java virtual machine adds an additional layer of software, making it much harder to see the relationship between the runtimes and the underlying algorithm. This paper presents some of the basic issues the author and his students have encountered when analyzing Java program runtimes and briefly discusses strategies to address them.

This paper presents an object--oriented design for a solitaire version of the game of Set® The design is responsibility driven and illustrates polymorphism and several fundamental design patterns, including Flyweight, Strategy and Factory. It introduces each of these to solve particular problems within the design. The direct application of these concepts and the interest our students show in the game make Set an ideal example for classroom discussions and assignments.

The event driven paradigm is ubiquitous in modern software. Many texts introduce events when discussing graphical user interfaces, but the event paradigm extends well beyond that domain. Events also play important roles in operating systems, component based systems, reactive systems, middleware, web services and other fields. Computer science educators have an obligation to see that our students thoroughly understand the event paradigm and have some grounding in tools to develop event driven systems. This paper describes an upper division, computer science elective course in event driven programming. The course gives a comprehensive treatment of event driven systems. It appropriately captures the importance of the event paradigm and serves to integrate concepts from several different computing fields, including Programming Languages, Operating Systems, and Software Engineering. It also introduces students to advanced tools and packages designed for developing event driven systems. The course has been taught four times at our institution, having repeatedly received high marks from the students for both its conceptual and technical content.

Empirical skills are playing an increasingly important role in the computing profession and our society. In addition to being problem-solvers and designers/engineers, computer scientists must also be capable experimenters in order to develop, test, and evaluate complex hardware and software systems. The widespread use of computers as tools for interdisciplinary research also demands a strong grounding in the scientific method.This panel is designed to promote discussion about innovative methods for integrating empirical skills within the traditional computer science curriculum. Each panelist will define a set of core empirical concepts and skills that they see as essential to computer scientists, with a brief rationale for each. In conjunction, they will describe classroom practices that serve to demonstrate the key concepts and/or develop skills they have identified. Sufficient time will be allocated for discussion and contributions from the audience.

Abstract This paper examines the control of complex physical objects in simulation. We introduce a programming paradigm that allows a simulation to be treated as a multi‐level constraint solver. The control programmer is given the ability to specify constraints on the controlled response of mechanisms and to conditionally change these constraints dependent on the state of system. The approach facilitates the development of model‐based, event‐driven control programs. The usefulness of the paradigm is demonstrated through the simulation of a hopping robot.

A model-independent method for controlling a hopping robot is presented. The approach focuses on the interaction between the hopper and its surroundings at points of contact. It is only through reactions at contact points that a hopper can alter its momenta. A generalization of the virtual leg abstraction allows control programs to be expressed as constraints on the external forces and torques acting on the hopper. The relationship between the nature of the external contacts and motion control strategies is investigated. The approach was tested in simulation using the model-driven dynamic simulator Newton. The experiments demonstrate the utility of simulation for studying physical control problems. Through simulation, a broad range of design parameters can be easily tested to determine the limits of the control strategy.>