ABOUT THE EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE SEMINAR


Read about us in a recent issue of the George Street Journal !


Computer Science 92, the Educational Software Seminar, is a software development coures taught in the Computer Science Department of Brown University. Founded by Professor Andries van Dam the course was developed and taught for several years with David Niguidula, and is being taught this Spring by Roger B. Blumberg. Dr. van Dam is the Thomas J. Watson Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science, as well as the director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization. Blumberg is Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, as well as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Elementary and Secondary Education at Brown.

In this innovative software seminar, groups of students work with local teachers in elementary, secondary, university and community education to design and implement applications for classroom use.

Students in CS092 attend semi-weekly discussion-based seminars, often attended by distinguished guests from areas of educational technology including design, analysis, theory, development, marketing, and assessment. In addition to the projects, students read and discuss texts drawn from the literatures of computer science, the history of education, and cognitive science, and learn to use authoring tools and environments to facilitate creation of their products.

Prior to the start of the seminar, proposals for CS92 projects are solicited from local teachers. During the first weeks of the course, students form teams and select a project which will be the focus of thier work for the entire semester.

Student teams work closely with their sponsoring teacher, meeting about once a week. At the beginning of the semester, students observe the teacher's style of teaching as well as the dynamics of the teacher's classroom or laboratory. Student-teacher discussions focus on instructional goals and the ways that the software might help in their accomplishment.

Within two weeks of meeting the teacher, the students in the seminar create a detailed project proposal, sketching out the type of program they would like to develop and the goals it will achieve. The next six weeks of the course focus on designing the project, and culminates in a "storyboard," which shows the layout of the primary screens, the types of user interaction involved in the program, and a description of the ideas and concepts that will be presented to the sudent users.

The last four weeks of the course focus on the technical implementation of the software, and culminates in testing in the classroom.

At the end of the course, participating teachers have a working piece of software, custom-designed for their teaching needs, and the seminar students have been immersed in every phase of creating a real software product with real-world users.


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