Student competitions are widespread across all academic disciplines, and are often touted as a means to motivate and educate students. Competitions may be internal within a single class or course, or vie school against school as regional, national, or international competitions and exist at all levels including 9-12 grades. These competitions have different formats and focuses such as vulnerability assessments, forensic challenges, offensive, and defensive competitions (or a combination of these). Some competitions require simple scripts and are considered ideal for script kitties while others require in-depth understanding of computer security and networking techniques to successfully compete in the competition. While the number of competitions and students participating in them have increased, it is unclear whether the stated academic goals of the competition are being met. In some cases, it appears that the focus of the student and institutional effort is more on the competition itself than on learning underlying concepts and developing skills. At our institution, students participate in several cyber-competitions, some of which we have initiated. The purpose of this paper is to survey existing cybercompetitions to understand the purpose of the competition, review underlying stated educational goals, and explore how the competition meets these goals. We compare the role of cyber competitions with the role of other computer-related competitions such as robotics, programming, unmanned aerial vehicles, and artificial intelligence comparing and contrasting the educational impact of the competitions on the participants.

MyTuringTable is a Turing Machine simulator designed to help students read and understand Turing's seminal 1937 paper on computability. We discuss our reasons for developing the tool, and report on its use in a "Great Ideas in Computer Science" course for the Air Force Academy Cadet Scholars program.

The advent of laptops, mobile devices, and ubiquitous connectivity in the classroom has created both opportunities and challenges for the learning environment. Students, often feeling that they are good multitaskers, will use their laptops to read e-mail or browse the web during classes. Telling students the results of multitasking research may convince some students not to become distracted, but experiencing it first-hand provides a more active learning approach to the lesson. The goal of this project was to design a meaningful demonstration of the negative effects of multitasking so that students would internalize the message and, hopefully, change their behavior, if necessary. In this demonstration students were assigned to three groups, one which had no computing distraction (students were asked to take notes on paper), one which had a single on-line distraction, and one group which had dual on-line distractions. All groups were told that distractions should not be allowed to interfere with their class work. At the end of the lecture, students completed a quiz on the material just presented to test their level of understanding. There was a significant effect on quiz performance. The group without distractions obtained higher quiz scores than either distraction group. End-of-semester feedback showed that 63.5% of the students reported modifying their behavior in class based on the demonstration.

ABET-based program outcomes are the skills and knowledge that a student successfully completing the program has obtained at the time of graduation. For a Computer Science program, many of these outcomes require a developmental progression of learning experiences that are best provided incrementally across courses. Achievement of such a progression is predicated on a cooperative effort by faculty to define effective approaches to realizing the outcomes. However, the progression must also minimize demands on individual courses and eliminate unnecessary restrictions on faculty discretion in course design and implementation. In addition, a time-phased assessment plan should be overlaid upon the progression to measure and track the developmental process. This work documents our effort to define a developmental progression in our computer science program to better achieve ABET-based outcomes, integrate the progression into an existing curriculum in a minimally invasive manner, and incrementally assess the effectiveness of the approach.

Mobile computing is becoming ubiquitous across many areas including education. Many of the education-based applications are targeted toward the student as the end-user and trying to create a more effective educational environment using mobile technology. At our institution, we are investigating such applications, but wanted to look at tools focusing on the educator as well as the student. In this regard, we have developed and are testing a mobile productivity tool, SHERPA, for use by both the student and the instructor in the classroom. It is designed to assist the instructor in a number of administrative classroom activities and facilitate instructor-to-instructor communication. Student functionality includes the ability to interact with the instructor and other students, arrange collaborative meetings, and provide feedback on lectures. SHERPA is designed with a cloud computing architecture and attempts to leverage information sharing between instructors with common students. SHERPA was initially developed and tested in Fall semester 2010 with more extensive evaluation in the Spring 2011 semester. User feedback is very positive. This paper will describe SHERPA's functionality and design, its use in the classroom, instructor experience and feedback on the tool, and future plans.

Computer graphics is a fun course for both teachers and students. The topics are filled with interesting images and animations, there is a wealth of support material available, and students are motivated to express creativity in projects. There are also underlying math concepts and algorithms that some students find challenging to fully understand. At our institution, we teach a computer graphics course to junior and senior-level computer science majors as an elective. To assist their understanding of fundamental concepts and algorithms, we created and employed a collaborative learning approach using locally developed interactive tools during each lecture. The Think-Pair-Share model was used to facilitate collaborative interaction between students. The results of this approach were measured through in-class feedback questions and student performance on individual exam questions. Students enjoyed using the tools, highly rating them on the feedback forms, but were less enthusiastic about the classroom methodology used to present them. These results along with lessons learned will be addressed.

Stack frames are a fundamental concept in computer science often taught in an operating systems or an assembly language programming course. Computer security courses also rely on an understanding of stack frame concepts when teaching buffer overflow attacks. To assist students in learning the fundamentals of stack frames and related concepts, we have developed an interactive Simple Machine Simulator tool that allows students to step through a C-like language program and watch how memory changes. We have used this tool successfully in various courses to teach different aspects of stack frames and their use. This paper will describe the tool, how it is used to teach stack frame concepts, our experience, and future plans.

Passwords are a fundamental security vulnerability in many systems. Several researchers have investigated the tradeoff between password memorability versus resiliency to cracking and have looked at alternative systems such as graphical passwords and biometrics. To create stronger passwords, many systems enforce rules regarding the required length and types of characters passwords must contain. Another suggested approach is to use passphrases to combat dictionary attacks. One common ¿trick¿ used to remember passwords that conform to complex rules is to select a pattern of keys on the keyboard. While appearing random, the pattern is easy to remember. The purpose of this research was to investigate how often patterns are used, whether patterns could be classified into common categories, and whether those categories could be used to attack and defeat pattern-based passwords. Visualization techniques were used to collect data and assist in pattern categorization. The approach successfully identified two out of eleven passwords in a real-world password file that were not discovered with a traditional dictionary attack. This paper will present the approach used to collect and categorize patterns, and describe the resulting attack method that successfully identified passwords in a live system.

Engaging students in the learning process has been shown to be an effective means for education. Several methods have been proposed to achieve this engagement for computer science and other disciplines. Active learning is one such technique that incorporates interactive classroom activities to reinforce concepts and involve the students. Visualizations of computer science concepts such as algorithm animations can be used for these activities. To be most effective in this environment, they need to be designed and used with active learning in mind. This paper describes the design characteristics of such visualizations, ways of using them in the classroom, and our experience with developing and using visualization tools across different courses in the computer science curriculum.

Visualization can be an effective means for analyzing security data and teaching students different concepts about various security algorithms. At the Air Force Academy, interactive visualizations are used to teach ciphers to students in a cryptography course. In the course of preparing student visualizations about the RC4 cipher characteristics, an anomaly was discovered in the basic encryption algorithm. This paper describes the anomaly and the process of how it was discovered through visualization.

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Introductory Computer Graphics is a popular and motivational course for computer science undergraduates. The students have the ability to “see” the results of their programs, the opportunity to apply a high level of creativity, and the satisfaction of impressing their peers. Computer animation provides similar advantages from a motivational point of view. A normal scheduling sequence for these two courses would place them in successive semesters (or quarters) in the curriculum, presumably in the senior year so students have as much computer science experience as possible prior to starting the graphics course. Unfortunately, at the Air Force Academy, such a sequence was not possible, forcing us to investigate the integration of the two courses during the same semester (second semester senior year). Our experience is that the two courses could not only be successfully integrated during the same semester, but that the student experience in each course benefited from the concepts being simultaneously presented in the complementary course. This paper will provide background on the two courses, describe our experience in teaching them simultaneously, and discuss our future plans for expanding the pilot program.

Student comprehension of the concepts and algorithms in computer graphics requires a thorough visual understanding of the processes involved. To assist this understanding in the computer graphics course at the Air Force Academy, a set of interactive visualization programs were created for classroom use. These programs demonstrate key graphic concepts using various visual metaphors. The process of creating and using these tools in the classroom highlighted several design guidelines when creating classroom visualization tools. This paper describes these design guidelines, and the way in which the tools are used in the classroom to support lecture material. The paper concludes with our experience using these tools and future plans.

The Department of Computer Science at the United States Air Force Academy teaches an introductory Pascal programming and problem solving course to 1400 freshman a year. Although the students have a wide range of prior programming experiences, very few have any practice with program design. To encourage proper solution design and alleviate the burdensome and demotivating reams of design documentation, the Department of Computer Science has developed an automated tool, the Automated Interactive Design Editor (AIDE). This paper will provide some background on the problems associated with student design documentation, describe how AIDE attempts to address this problem, and discuss future directions for the tool.

Texture is an important surface characteristic which provides a great deal of information about the nature of a surface, and several computationally complex algorithms have been implemented to replicate realistic textures in computer shaded images. Perceptual psychologists have recognized the importance of surface texture as a cue to space perception, and have attempted to delineate which factors provide primary shape information. A rendering algorithm is presented which uses these factors to produce a texture specifically designed to aid visualization. Since the texture is not attempting to replicate an actual texture pattern, it is called “artificial” texturing. This algorithm avoids the computational limitations of other methods because this “artificial” approach does not require complex mappings from a defined texture space to the transformed image to be rendered. A simple filtering method is presented to avoid unacceptable aliasing.

A scanline algorithm is described which renders bicubic patches directly from the parametric description without producing a polygonal approximation. The algorithm is partially based on earlier work by Whitted. A primitive object, called a “curved-edge polygon”, is defined, and an algorithm for breaking down a bicubic patch into the primitive objects is described. A general surface intersection method is employed to provide a robust silhouette edge detector. Shades are computed by calculating a cubic approximation to the normal surface and performing either a cubic or a linear interpolation of the bounding edge normals across the scanline. Subdivision of parametric surfaces is used to reduce the complexity of the surfaces being rendered, providing dramatic improvement in the results of both the silhouette detector and the shading methods.