Department of Computer Science, Ball State University

Four computer science students attended Consortium of Computing Sciences in Colleges Midwest conference and Midwestern Women In Computing conference (10/15/2009)

CCSC:MW 2009 students from BSU

Four computer science students had the opportunity to share their projects and discoveries at the Consortium of Computing Sciences in Colleges Midwest conference (CCSC:MW) and the Midwestern Women In Computing (MidWIC) conferences on October 9-10, and one walked away with first place in a student research competition.

The Consortium of Computing Sciences in Colleges Midwest conference is a regional conference for educators. "An experience report and analysis of Java technologies in undergraduate game programming courses" was co-presented by Assistant Professor Paul Gestwicki, undergraduate Austin Toombs, and CS alumnus Andrew Haddad; the paper was co-authored with Associate Professor Fu-Shing Sun.

MidWIC is the Midwestern Women In Computing conference, a conference devoted to the advocacy and support of women in computing careers, both industrial and academic. Doctoral candidate Khuloud Ahmad presented a poster on the use of App Inventor for Android and Studio-Based Learning for teaching non-majors courses, a project sponsored by Google. Graduate student Carrie Arnold presented her work on conference visualization using the Microsoft Surface and RFID technology, a collaboration with the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts. Russian exchange student Anastasia Goryacheva presented on the differences between computing education in Russia and the United States.

Undergraduate computer science major Austin Toombs won first place in the student research poster competition for his poster entitled, "Using interactive curriculum visualization to facilitate decision making among students". Mr. Toombs has been working in Dr. Gestwicki's curriculum visualization research group on techniques for visually representing abstract curricular ideas as well as methods for evaluating the efficacy of such techniques. This work was funded by an internal ASPiRE grant.

Computer Science Graduate Student Presents at WikiSym 2009 Conference (11/2/2009)

A computer science graduate student recently had the opportunity to share the software engineering solution that he and his classmates developed at the WikiSym 2009 conference in Orlando, Florida on October 25-27.

Computer science graduate student David Largent presented a poster titled "DynaTable: A Wiki Extension for Structured Data." Mr. Largent co-authored the paper, which was presented as a poster, with computer science graduate students Carrie Arnold and Todd Fleming and Assistant Professor Chris Lüer. During the Spring 2009 CS697: Software Engineering course, these three graduate students and their classmates developed an extension to the popular wiki software, Mediawiki, which allows wiki editors to create tables that can be displayed on multiple wiki pages, and can be partially displayed based on different filtering criteria.

Mr. Largent said of his experience, “It was great to be able to interact with other wiki researchers from around the world and have them validate the work of which I had been a part.” Dr. Lüer and Mr. Largent both participated in WikiSym 2009, which is the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, and is dedicated to wiki and open collaboration research and practice. Its proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library. A wiki is a website-based collaboration tool and content management system where everyone with access to the website can read, edit, and organize the contents, usually through a simple browser interface. The technology is so flexible, however, that wikis are being used for almost any conceivable purpose.

Google Funds Project to Teach Programming of Android Cell Phones (10/8/2009)

CS116 students are using cutting-edge technology from Google to develop smart phone applications this semester. The new technology is called "App Inventor for Android", and it allows students with no prior programming experience to learn the fundamentals of software development by developing applications for Android--enabled smart phones such as the G1 and MyTouch. The course is being team-taught by Computer Science faculty member Paul Gestwicki and doctoral candidate Khuloud Ahmad.

The course is sponsored by a grant from Google, Inc., who provided 20 G1 Developer Phones for the class. The phones have been distributed to the students, who are able to use them in their daily routines, thereby gaining a deeper understanding of the capabilities of the hardware and potential for new software. Student teams are collaborating in the classroom to develop applications, turning the lab into a studio for software design and development.

App Inventor for Android is a Web-based development platform for smart phone applications. Ball State University is one of eleven institutions who are participating in the first field test of the software. App Inventor incorporates a visual programming language that leverages a building-blocks metaphor for program construction. Students connect "blocks" that represent visual components, program logic, and the G1 hardware, and advanced program behavior results from composition of these blocks. This allows students to focus on the meanings of the programs rather than arcane syntax.

The CS116 course is being used to advance the state-of-the-art in Computer Science education research. Dr. Gestwicki and Ms. Ahmad are using the course to study motivating factors in Computer Science education, including both the smart phone technology and studio-based learning pedagogy.