Barbara Ericson Promising Practices in CS1 Media Computation for CS1 Barbara Ericson Georgia Institute of Technology

Barbara Ericson Promising Practices in CS1 What is Media Computation? Learning computing using media projects –Teaching iteration by looping through all the pixels of a picture, all the samples in a sound, or all the frames in a movie. –Teaching conditionals using red-eye removal, chromakey and force to extremes –Teaching strings by writing programs that create HTML pages A set of classes that make these programs easy to write –in Python or Java

Barbara Ericson Promising Practices in CS1 An Example Program public void forceToExtremes() { SoundSample[] sampleArray = this.getSamples(); for (SoundSample sample : sampleArray) { /* if the value was positive or 0 set * it to the maximum * positive value */ if (sample.getValue() >= 0) { sample.setValue(32767); } else { sample.setValue(-32768) }

History of Media Computation Developed by Mark Guzdial of Georgia Tech Fall 1999 – all GT students must take CS1! –Led to 26-35% failure rate –Women failed at a higher rate than men up to 40% –Over 50% failure rate for some majors Management, History, Public Policy, Architecture Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson

Why Media Computation? Contextualized computing education should make computing more relevant and concrete –CS1315: Introduction to Media Computation Using Python with a Media context For management, history, public policy, architecture majors –CS1371: Computing for Engineers Using MATLAB with an Engineering context –CS1321: CS1 for Computer Science Majors Using Python with a robotics context Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson

Results? Media Computation (CS1315) since Fall 2003 at GT –The failure rate has dropped significantly –Women do better than men about 4% better failure rates of 7% v 11%, 10% v 14%, 17% v 22% –Some non-majors have transferred into computer science! MajorTraditional CS1Media Comp Architecture46.7%85.7% Biology64.4%90.4% Economics54.5%92.0% History46.5%67.6% Management48.5%87.8% Public Policy47.9%85.4% Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson

How is Media Comp Used? in CS1 –Used for non-majors at Georgia Tech, Un. Calif at Berkeley, and others –Used for CS majors at U. Ill- Chicago, Kalamazoo College, Gainesville College, and others in CS2 –Used at Georgia Tech, Gainesville College, Linfield College in High School –for pre-AP, AP, and summer camps in Georgia, Tennesee, Bermuda, and others Other institutions report similar results Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson

What Works? Open ended-creative projects –students turn in their homework and then keep working on the project to see what else they can do Allow students to share their work –I can't be beat! Transfer from Python to Java –cs1315 to cs1316 Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson Soup-Audio Collage

Future Media Computation Work Working on a textbook for a CS2 course with Media Computation – s1316/ s1316/ Working on a textbook merging Alice and Media Computation – eaPartyhttp://home.cc.gatech.edu/T eaParty The robotics course is adding some media computation projects – Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson

CS2 Media Computation Driving question: “How did the wildebeests stampede in The Lion King?” Linked lists of music Trees of sounds and images Simulations using stacks and queues Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson Canon

Additional Resources Python and Java books Course web sites – cs1315/ cs1315/ – cs1316/ cs1316/ Teachers web site ediaComp-teach Mailing List /mailman/listinfo/mediacom p-teach Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson

Funding Sources National Science Foundation Georgia Tech's College of Computing Georgia’s Department of Education GVU Center Al West Fund President's Undergraduate Research Award Toyota Foundation Atlanta Women's Foundation Promising Practices in CS1 Barbara Ericson