Statistics have a way, sometimes, of inspiring people to take action.
“Nationwide, undergraduate computer science enrollments are down 40 to 60 percent,” said Valerie Barr, Computer Science chair. “It’s important that we figure out how to get these kids back into the field. Computation is a fabulous tool and there are really exciting problems out there that need computer science as part of their solutions.”
In 2007, Barr and Chun Wai Liew of Lafayette College jointly won a $1.15 million National Science Foundation grant. The five-year award comes from the NSF program, “CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education,” and is funding the two institutions’ “Campus Wide Computation Initiative – A New Model for Computing Education.”
Now, two years into the project, Barr is already seeing results that are changing the computer science landscape at Union. These results compliment efforts that were already underway in the CS department to create five theme-based introductory courses.
The upcoming terms mark the first time all these classes, which encourage non-CS majors to do discipline-specific but computation-intensive work, will be offered in the same academic year.
Barr and her colleagues also want to see computation in other departments. The grant provides funding that supports summer research collaboration between professors and students from all academic backgrounds.
“The goal is for faculty to develop a lab or module that incorporates computation in a way that’s relevant to their discipline,” Barr said. “Out of every one of these summer initiatives comes some way of infusing computation into existing courses.”
This summer, for example, engineering Professor Ashraf Ghaly and Trevor Porter ’11 used Second Life, a 3-D virtual world, to build a pyramid complete with all its tunnels and secret chambers.
“When Ashraf takes students on the Egypt mini-term, getting into some of the pyramids can be challenging,” Barr said. “But he really wants students to experience as much of the pyramids as possible, and Second Life gives them one way to do this.”
It also provides students with the opportunity to actually learn computing skills since they must ultimately use program code to change the appearance of the virtual pyramid.
Six of the nine modules created this summer in subjects ranging from film studies to astronomy will begin running in courses during upcoming year. Two more will debut in the 2010-2011 year.
These numbers represent tremendous growth from last summer. In 2008, four projects were undertaken, two of which resulted in modules that were immediately taught in macroeconomics and acoustics of speech production.
Further adding to this year’s success, two teachers from Bard High School Early College also developed modules. This thrills Barr because engaging high school students in computation early on, she said, will only strengthen participation at the collegiate level.
And cross-disciplinary education at the collegiate level is both beneficial and desirable, as evidenced by Union’s most recent class. The College just graduated its largest number of CS majors since 1992, and half of these students were double or interdepartmental majors.
“I look at a company like IBM that’s hiring biologists and economists, and our computer science students will be able to go into an interview and say, ‘I already know how to work with people from these fields,’” Barr said. “Because that’s what they’ve done here.”