Improving CS Education?

sachachua asks: "You know CS could be taught better. I've decided that I really want to get into improving CS education. My university seems like the best place to start. I like the way we do CS, but I know it can be improved. I want to find the weaknesses in our CS program. I want to know how other schools are teaching computer science - what they're doing better, what they're doing differently. Then I want to help improve the way CS is being taught and learned. I'd like to benefit from this before I graduate. (See? I have a selfish reason after all.)" Do you think that the current CS teaching practices used in college or uni are insufficient for the new century? How would you improve the curriculum and the way in which these classes are taught?

"I've been reading through the ACM SIGCSE proceedings and there are some studies I'd like to do in order to give myself some research training (we don't get much of that in our regular curriculum). We're also trying to organize peer mentoring and code clinics (but that brings up interesting ethical questions). What are other things students can do to improve the quality of their CS education?

My university's already doing some pretty cool things. One of my professors sneaked some patterns into an introductory course. The teachers are super-approachable. But it's just that I look at our curriculum and classes and teachers and I realize that there's so much more that can be done.

I want to know this:

Lots of people have probably already tried this before - improving the way CS is taught/learned. I want to know how it turned out or how it's turning out. Do you have any advice? Notes? Ideas? Know anyone I should talk to? I'm an insanely motivated geek here and I want to make sure I get the best CS education with the (rather limited) resources available. If it incidentally helps other people, then that would be a Really Good Thing. =)"

Comments

Start with the faculty

[SecGuy]

I took undergraduate classes from CS departments at two different universities over a period of twelve years (1980-92). (I kept getting jobs and stuff, okay? :-) I've also hired and managed dozens of programmers since then.

First I'll address this question as a student, then as an employer.

Unviersity "A" had a much lower ranking, and did not emphasize research. University "B" was much larger, much better funded, and was rated in the top ten state university CS programs.

I think that undergraduate programs in research-intensive fields such as computer science suffer tremendously when the priority is on research and not on teaching. The poster talks about approachability: this is WHY YOU ARE AT A UNIVERSITY, is so you can interact 1:1 with people who have made studying CS their lives. Spending time with someone whose research is a notch less exciting is infinitely preferable to spending NO TIME with someone whose fascinating research you might as well have just read a book about.

No big surprise, I learned a lot more stuff, both useful and interesting, at University "A" than at University "B". It was also a much more satisfying experience.

I wish that I hadn't been such a slacker in High School, as I hear great things about some of the very, very top programs, that combine the best of both worlds.

So: hire faculty who actually want to teach undergraduates, who will spend 1:1 (or 1:N for small values of N) time with them, and who are good communicators.

As an employer, I really like the increased attention in a number of universities to group projects and methodology. Not that what they teach is necessarily any good (same for theory & algorithms) but because it at least provides some underpinnings and may persuade students that thinking about these things is important.

It's extremely helpful to someone I'm interviewing if, upon graduation, they can sit down and demo a significant piece of software that they worked on with a team.

So: make sure your CS graduates have at least some meaningful group-based project where they create something they can show peopple.

#1 problem is the students

[LordNimon]

I received my MS degree at the same university where I got my BS degree (both in Computer Science). While a grad student, I tought undergraduates in exchange for free tuition. I can tell you one thing: I learned a whole lot more than the students did.

Granted, this is just one school, but I think it's something you'll find in most universities. My students just did NOT want to learn the material. They would skip class and not visit me during office hours, and then complain that they didn't get enough help for the projects (I'm serious!). None of them showed any natural aptitude or curiosity whatsoever.

I was one of those students who generally knew more than the teaching assistants, since I had already been programming for ten years by the time I was a freshman (I miss my TRS-80 :-)). But when it was my turn to teach, I was amazed at the laziness and ineptitude I saw. I know my classmates back in college were never this bad, so I can only assume one of two things:

• I'm a really, really bad teacher and somehow I convinced the students they'd be better off not doing any work.
• My students really were less competent.

Reason #2 makes a lot more sense to me.

So before you go trying to improve the CS curriculum, take a look and see if your classmates are worth it. You might be better off finding a good professor and volunteering to work with him on projects.
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Step One: Do not use Java/OO

[Nagash]

Someone else has mentioned it already, but I will reiterate: Java does not make a good language to start learning with in a Computer Science program.

I am less than a month away from finishing a four year Honours Computer Science program at the University of Western Ontario. When I started in 1997, we were taught Pascal for the first year course(s) and C for the second year, with C++, Java and others (including Scheme for a course) in third and fourth year, depending on the courses you took. After my first year, they switched to teaching Java off the bat and leaving C out of it (even for second year).

The first thing that profs noticed was how much more difficult it was to get students to understand basic algorithms and simple CompSci concepts (trees, linked lists, etc). The OO stuff just got in the way. Everyone was hung up on trying to figure out how to simple things because of the object stuff like members, function declaration, etc. was just confusing to wade through for students not familiar with the concepts. What ended up happening was profs had to start explaining OO in some minor way, which only confused them further.

Now, some of this can be attributed to growing pains associated with changing a program curriculum. However, I am also currently a teaching assistant (TA) for the third-year operating systems course and the caliber of student I am seeing from a programming perspective is quite lacklustre. The OS course is required, so there are a lot of people taking it and I get to mark about a third of the assignments handed in. I will tell you now that I am, generally, not impressed with what I see. The students are beating themselves up trying to grasp the concepts of C when coming from a world of Java (recall, these third-year students never had C) since Java hides so much from them.

What I'm getting at is that a good language to start with is not OO. Why? Because the concept of OO makes much more sense after you've been introduced to iterative/functional programming. The natural way to solve a problem is not with objects and obfuscation (i.e., good design), but to work out a solution and step through it a la iterative/functional programming. (more on this in a sec)

You want to avoid Java because it hides too much. Java is good after you have an understanding of what is happening in the machine. In fact, Java is a nice language after the fundamentals are known to you.

Now, about the above point of iterative/functional making more sense, naturally. Firstly, think about how you tend to solve problems: come up with an idea, walk through the steps to get it to work. Note that there is nothing about objects in there. A pseudo-code algorithm translates a lot easier to a C program than it does a Java program. Pseudo-code is what a lot of first/second year students see and it should not be a chore to implement it. Functional languages are natural for some (like me) and follow the principle of "when I'm done with this, I'll give it to you", which is also not too tough to grasp once introduced to it.

Bear in mind - I am not anti-OO. I just think it's a more advanced concept that should be saved for later. I design everything around the OO philosophy now in my programs (no matter what language). It is good. It is just not for students starting out.

Can you tell me..

[mindstrm]

What your definition of 'CS' is? I ask this in all seriousness. Computing science/Computer Science varies greatly. In some schools, the program is about programming and technical details, in others, it's more about algorithms and theory. One is about science, the other is more about engineering. Which is it you want?

Sysadmin/Web design/administrative programming or banging out simple apps is not computing science...

Re:I think it can be improved...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

This presupposes that object-oriented is the be-all and end-all of programming. Which it's not.

My college (which has a CS program I'm pretty happy with, all in all) teaches all the first- and second-year courses in Java now. When I went through, it was C++, which really meant "C with a bit of object stuff thrown in." Now, I've noticed that a lot of the newer students do have a kind of gut-level grasp of OO concepts and practices that I had to struggle to attain ...

... but the fact is that the very first "real program" I wrote at my job was in C. Not C++, not Object C, damn sure not Java: straight C. And if I'd only been trained in Java at that point, I'd have been fucked. I've been in classes with people -- smart people, well-trained people -- who spend most of the semester trying to figure out what a pointer is, because Java hides those kinds of details; or it drives them nuts that they have to write this thing called "main" that's not in a class; or the concept of memory allocation and cleanup to prevent memory leaks is completely foreign. So they get to the junior level in CS and they think they know how to program, and they _do_, but there's a lot missing.

I like Java. I think it's a great language and I hope it continues to be used more widely. But neither Java itself nor OO programming in general is What Computer Science Is All About. There needs to be a mix of the high-level and low-level stuff. Evangelists for one or the other really annoy me.

More focus on the fundamentals

[dachshund]

I went to a small college that was busy trying to 'improve' their CS curriculum. Among other things, their particular approach was to put most of the introductory classes (first two years) onto the web, and switch all coding from C into Java, with an emphasis on newer technology. They even got a major grant from the government to try this 'experiment'.

I can only describe the result as an unmitigated disaster. The best aspects of my school's CS department had formerly been its focus on the fundamentals of CS; lacking a huge, monied department, we were taught how things work rather than how the latest database software interfaced (and this had produced generations of very successful graduates.) This curriculum had evolved over a period of years; naturally, there were newer classes, and we weren't still coding in Fortran, but the curriculum had been tested and slowly improved over time. The spate of sudden 'improvements' wrought by these changes have irrevocably changed the nature of our department. Aside from the fact that we have a generation of majors who don't know what a pointer is, much more effort is expended teaching the latest software or OS, to the detriment of the fundamental cross-language, cross-OS education that I enjoyed. So the point of all of this is that sudden, untested changes in a CS cirriculum can cause as much harm as good.