Convincing Colleges to Upgrade Their Classes?

Pray_4_Mojo asks: "I'm an engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh, and I'm currently taking a required class known as 'Computer Interfacing'. While I enjoy the instructor, I find most of the material to be severely dated. We will spend the majority of the class covering RS232/XMODEM/Token Ring means of computer-to-computer communication. Almost no mention of USB, Firewire, or IRDa is made within the class. I am trying to convince my professor that this material is relevant, as these types of interfaces will be dominate in the world we future grads will be working in. As an example, I demonstrated that the keycard access system to gain access to the Interfacing Lab has a USB port for data download/firmware programming. The professor seems interested, but it seems that I need to convince the department to revise the course requirements. Has anyone attempted to modernize their CS/Engineering program and met with success?"

Comments

Egads!

[jo42]

What next? Sneakernet?? 80K hard sectored 5.25" floppies??? Two tin cans and a string???? And this college degree is supposed to show that you are educated and get you a job in the real world?

The concepts you will learn are the same...

[gtwreck]

It's not about whether or not you have experience in the latest tools and technologies. It's whether you have the fundamentals in place to allow you to apply that fundamental knowledge to any other system.

In the specific case of serial interfaces, there really isn't all that much different between RS-232, RS-485, and USB or Firewire. They are all serial interfaces that employ the same fundamental concepts. In the real world you'll have to apply that knowledge to any number of serial interfaces.

The same logic can be applied to a discussion yesterday about using MS or open source programming environments in a CS department.

Re:The concepts you will learn are the same...

[itwerx]

No, not at all. (Are you trolling? :)
You are told to forget the technology which was used to convey the concepts, but the concepts are where the value is.
Here's an example.
If you want to learn how to fly a 747 you don't start out on one! You spend many years and tens of thousands of dollars learning on the concepts on smaller aircraft. Granted, knowing the gauge layout of a Cessna has zero relevance to a 747 but the concept of watching your fuel levels applies equally well in either case.
So yes, when you get to 747 school they will say "forget all that other airplane stuff" but they're not really telling you to forget the concepts, just the nitty-gritty details that you don't need any more.
Compres vous?

Re:The concepts you will learn are the same...

[cybermace5]

No.

USB and Firewire are vastly different from EIA-232 and siblings.

USB is much closer to Ethernet than it is to EIA-232. I've done some serial development and some USB development, and the USB development is abstracted from hardware by several layers; while serial is barely abstracted by one layer (in microcontrollers, if you're lucky to get a UART).

It really is different. I would agree that students would benefit from learning more modern interfaces later on, though EIA-232 is perfect for teaching basic communications concepts. I certainly had difficulty the first time I developed a USB peripheral; it had never been taught, if barely mentioned at all.

It makes sense now. The abstraction almost makes it easier to develop for on the PC side, and there are amazing features built right into the protocol. A simple microcontroller can change from a keyboard, to a mouse, to a joystick, or dozens of other devices with a simple change in firmware.

The new technologies are bad to learn from

[LordNimon]

The newer technologies are much harder to learn from than the older ones. The speeds are much higher, the protocols are more complicated, and the tools are more expensive. For a beginner learning this stuff, you never want to work with the latest technologies.

If you really want to learn about Firewire, do something with it for your Senior project.

Real experience modernizing curriculum

[nellardo]

Back in the day, in the early 90's, I was largely responsible/to blame for switching Brown University's undergraduate first semester programming course to object-oriented programming. It had been teaching structured programming, but industry at that time was following object-oriented design precepts (even if using languages like C). The faculty all firmly believed in OOP, and taught it in all upper-level courses. But it was seen as "too advanced" for beginning students.

As it turned out, the real problem was not teaching OOP to the students. OOP is easier to explain to new programmers than structured programming (people use real-world objects all the time - not so much real-world procedures). Half-way through the first semester, the students could implement Tetris.

The real problem was retraining the faculty. Even though they knew OOP was a good thing, it took them a while before they had internalized OOP enough to present, e.g., algorithms and data structures in an object-oriented style. No one believed that you could teach inheritance and polymorphism before you taught loops, conditionals, and arithmetic.

Faculty teaching the intro courses may be in touch with industry and research. That's not enough. The faculty need to rethink an entire course to present the right academic material in a modern, industry-relevant way. If the faculty can do that (and, make no mistake, it isn't easy), they you'll get a course the students love, that will get them a job, and that will prepare them for a strong academic program as well.

For the truly curious, the textbook for that course is actually still in print, even though it depended on Borland Pascal, which is long-since defunct.

Re:Fake Assembly

[nbvb]

Then you don't understand what a CS degree is good for.

My suggestion: Go to Chubb.

If you start thinking in the "That's not practical, who cares" mode, you belong in a trade school.

Sorry, I know that's not very politically correct, but it's the TRUTH.

Now, if you want to learn real computer SCIENCE, stick it out.

Learning assembly language for a theoretical computer is a great exercise -- you have to actually exercise that mush between your ears!

My favorite class in CS was Theory of Digital Machines.... designing AND, OR, NOT gates, building some theoretical microprocessors .... stuff that isn't "practical", but that theory means the world to you later on ...

Again, if you want practical, go to Chubb. If you want to learn something, stick it out ...

--NBVB

RS232 Is EVERYWHERE

[muscleman706]

I don't know about Token Ring, but RS232 is all over the place in industrial hardware like barcode scanners and other non-PC hardware. I think it is much simpler to program both for the programmers and the hardware designers. Also, remember that Intel came up with USB to sell processors because USB is a total CPU hog as compared to FireWire. So, while your PC does not have a problem with this now, certainly industrial hardware does not have the infrastructure on board to deal with USB. So, I think the appropriate thing is to talk about RS232, USB, IrA, BlueTooth, and WAP. You want BlueTooth because it is going to be in all cellphones, hence proliferate into everything else. You want WAP because for things where BlueTooth is too slow, you will want a higher-speed wireless system. For instance, you could have a WAP enabled Digital Video Camcorder that automatically pops up a recording window when you start recording, all without any wires!