[May 9th]: CIS seminar by Barb Ericson (Georgia Tech University)

• Speaker: Barb Ericson
• Location: CH430
• Date: Friday, May 9
• Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Seminar Abstract

There has been a 40-60% drop in computer science majors nationwide since 2001.  And, even though the industry has recovered from the dot-com crash in 2001 and now has more jobs than it did then, the students have not returned.  Studies of attitudes towards computing show that many students either don't have any idea what it is or believe all the negative stereotypes: computing is boring, abstract, anti-social, not creative, and irrelevant.

Media computation attacks these stereotypes by teaching all the usual computing concepts in ways that are interesting, concrete, social, creative, and relevant.  Students write programs that manipulate media.  We teach iteration by having them negate a picture or reverse a sound. We teach conditionals as a way to remove red-eye from a picture or to force sound values to their maximum allowed values. We teach about linked-lists by having students create and manipulate music. We teach about trees by creating trees of sounds and now different traversals sound different. We encourage creativity by having them create image and sound collages. We encourage social interaction by having students post their work on a website. 

The results have shown that even non-majors find the Media Computation CS1 course interesting and motivating.  At Georgia Tech all students must take CS1. Over 50% of management majors used to fail a traditional CS1 and now 88% pass the Media Computation version. Other institutions report similar results for both non-majors and majors.
 

Speaker Biography

Barbara Ericson is Director of CS Outreach at Georgia Tech. Barb is well-known internationally for her work with secondary school teachers to improve CS education and to increase the quantity and quality of CS students. She is an author of a recent book on programming using multimedia computation.