CS2013-final-report

How are students assessed
Students complete an assignment each week of 2-5 programming or other computational problems. Survey from
the past five years show that the average workload has been consistent at about 4 hours/week outside of structured
time, though the distribution does range from one hour to over 12. In addition, there is one in-class midterm exam
and an in-class final exam.
Course textbooks and materials
The course has a textbook that its instructors wrote for it: CS for Scientists and Engineers by its instructors, C.
Alvarado, Z. Dodds, R. Libeskind-Hadas, and G. Kuenning. Beyond that, we use Python, Logisim, JFLAP, and a
few other supplemental materials.
Why do you teach the course this way
Our CS department redesigned its introductory CS offering in 2006 to better highlight the breadth and richness of
CS over the previous introductory offering. In addition, the department’s redesign sought to encourage more
women to pursue CS beyond this required experience. A SIGCSE ’08. [1] publication, reported the initial
curricular changes and their results, including a significant and sustained increase in the number of women CS
majors. Subsequent publications at SIGCSE, ITiCSE, and Inroads. [2,3,4,5] flesh out additional context for this
effort and several longer-term assessments of the resulting changes.
References:
[1] Dodds, Z., Libeskind-Hadas, R., Alvarado, C., and Kuenning, G. Evaluating a Breadth-First CS 1 for
Scientists. SIGCSE ’08.
[2] Alvarado, C., and Dodds, Z. Women in CS: An Evaluation of Three Promising Practices. SIGCSE ’10.
[3] Dodds, Z., Libeskind-Hadas, R., and Bush, E. When CS1 is Biology1: Crossdisciplinary collaboration as CS
context. ITiCSE '10.
[4] Dodds, Z., Libeskind-Hadas, R., and Bush, E. Bio1 as CS1: evaluating a crossdisciplinary CS context.
ITiCSE ’12.
[5] Alvarado, C., Dodds, Z., and Libeskind-Hadas, R. Broadening Participation in Computing at Harvey Mudd
College. ACM Inroads, Dec. 2012.
Body of Knowledge coverage
KA Knowledge Unit Topics Covered Hours
AL AL/Algorithmic Strategies Brute-force, especially as expressed recursively 3
AL
AL/Basic Automata, Computability
and Complexity
Precisely those, plus Kolmogorov Complexity 6
AR AR/Digital logic and digital systems Combinational logic design, as well as building flipflops
and memory from them
3
AR
AR/Machine level representation of
data
Binary, two’s complement, other bases 1.5
AR
AR/Assembly level machine
organization
Assembly constructs, von Neumann architecture, the
use of the stack to support function calls (and recursion
in particular)
3
- 392 -