Our mission in the Computer Science Education group at Duke is to develop state-of-the-art educational practices and to ensure that these practices and those of the Department's core research groups build on each other.
The goal of our group to design and develop software tools and both traditional (paper) and web-based materials for the support of teaching and learning in computer science courses. Computer science education has two foci: developing effective practices for teaching the subdisciplines that comprise the field and developing materials that support learning in a wide variety of computer science courses. Principle concerns include incorporating new research and new technology into the subject and delivery of current courses, and the development of new courses to reflect rapid changes in research and technology. The Computer Science Education group has expertise and is highly regarded in three principle areas: research and development of materials for the first two years of courses in computer science; development of software tools supporting visualization and animation of topics from theoretical computer science; incorporation of current, core research into undergraduate computer science courses.
Current project activities in these areas include the development of material to support an apprentice style of learning of object-oriented programming and design that spans beginning to advanced courses in computer science. We are also implementing several tools that visually illustrate topics from the theory of computation, including finite automata and grammars, with animations and interactive programs. We are facilitating the development of tools to integrate and visualize performance metrics from several areas, including cache performance, in several undergraduate courses.
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NSF supported CS Education projects |
Adventures in Alice Programming
Peer Led Team Learning in CS
Science of Networks
Problem Based Learning
Visual and interactive tools for
exploring formal languages and theoretical
computer science and main tool JFLAP
Apprentice Learning in CS2
Using and Developing Patterns
CURIOUS and
DROOL
Incorporating
departmental research into undergraduate courses.
In a SIGCSE 1998 paper, Profs. Susan Rodger and Owen Astrachan discuss the animation and visualization in the CS1. Labs, assignments and materials from these courses show how we use the materials described in the paper.
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Professor of the Practice of Computer Science
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Lecturer in Computer Science
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Assistant Professor of the Practice of Computer Science
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Professor of the Practice of Computer Science
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Associate Professor of the Practice of Computer Science Emeritus
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