SIGCSE 2012 - Supporter Sessions
- Thursday, March 1, 2012
- Friday, March 2, 2012
All Things Google and Education
Thursday, March 1, 2012 – 3:45PM – 5:00PM
Margaret Johnson, Director of University Relations and Education, Google Inc.
Google believes that all students should have the opportunity to become active creators of tomorrow's technology. Through our diverse set of education efforts, we invest in the next generation of computer scientists and engineers, providing opportunities for all students to engage more directly in technology.
Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. With regard to education, our goal is to leverage Google's strengths and infrastructure to increase access to high-quality, open educational content and technology.
During this session, you will learn about all of Google's education initiatives with a focus on those related to Computer Science.
The MIT Center for Mobile Learning and the Future of App Inventor
Friday, March 2, 2012 – 1:45 – 3:00PM
Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering MIT
Mark Friedman, Former App Inventor Project Lead Google
The MIT Media Lab applies an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life—including technologies used in education. Through a generous grant from Google, the Media Lab recently expanded on this work by establishing the MIT Center for Mobile Learning led by Hal Abelson, Mitch Resnick, and Eric Kopfler. The Center’s work revolves around the principle that mobile technology can fulfill its potential to enhance education only if teachers and learners can create new mobile technologies, not merely experience them as consumers.
This session will discuss the Center’s three new initiatives:
- Scratch, used by millions of students and teachers, is a media-based programming tool that introduces young people to computing in an way that emphasizes creativity and sharing. Later this spring, the Center will be releasing browser-based Scratch 2.0, which extends Scratch to the Web and to Web services.
- TaleBlazer, from the Center’s Scheller Teacher Education Program, is a location-based augmented reality mobile gaming platform, where people use blocks programming to create behaviors for characters in the game.
- App Inventor is a programming tool that makes it easy, even for beginners, to create applications for Android phones. App Inventor was incubated at Google Research, and has been transferred to the Center, which is continuing its development as an open source system and providing it as an open service for educational use.
Teaching Parallelism Lightning Rounds
Thursday March 1, 10:45 am - 12:00 pm
The Teaching Parallelism Lightning Rounds special session is a place to meet and exchange ideas between those beginning the process of incorporating parallelism into their classrooms and curriculum and those already moving down that pathway. This session will build on the popular and exciting Ignite micro-presentations pioneered by O’Reilly.
The session will be in two parts: a set of short presentations (5 minutes and 5 slides each) highlighting recent experiences, followed by a community discussion and swap meet about other techniques, tweaks, and opportunities for including parallelism as part of the regular CS curriculum. Each presenter will answer the question "How have I brought parallelism into the computer science classroom?" as well as to provide examples of their content, techniques, tools etc.
This session is sponsored by Intel and will be shepherded by the Educational Alliance for a Parallel Future (EAPF), the industry and academic members of which have participated in or run parallelism-focused BOFs and sessions at the past several SIGCSE conferences.
Final presenters will be announced soon. If you would like to participate or learn more, please contact Professor Matthew Wolf or Paul Steinberg .
Intel Academic Assembly: What are the next imperatives?
Friday March 2, 10:45 am - 12:00 pm
- Lakshmi Talluru: Director, Technology Strategies
- Burke Walls: US Intern Program Manager
- Michael Wrinn: Academic Outreach
- Bob Chesebrough: Senior Course Architect
- Paul Steinberg: Academic Community Manager
There are a number of important currents in computing that will need to be addressed by undergraduate computer science. These include mobility, power and performance, security and cloud computing. How will these trends and concepts be embraced by the curriculum, supported by your administration and comprehended by your students? How can Intel help in this?
You are cordially invited to the Intel Academic Assembly to hear our view and offer your opinions and ideas. This will be your chance to meet members of the Intel Academic Team, learn about opportunities for engagement and propose new directions for collaboration.
For the last five years, Intel has been at the forefront of ongoing efforts to integrate parallelism into undergraduate computer science education. We are now starting to see the fruits of these efforts. Here in the United States, a new ACM Curriculum recommendation is coming out with parallelism throughout; Research work from Berkeley, the University of Illinois and other institutions on design patterns and parallel models is now being widely disseminated; worldwide, many universities and colleges have parallelism in their core curriculum. We look forward to continuing our work collaborating on these and new areas of endeavor.
Empowering Students: Teaching Software Development with Windows Phone
Thursday March 1, 10:45 am - 12:00 pm
Rob Miles, University of Hull
With Windows Phone it is really easy to make publishing applications and games part of the learning experience. Students love being able to share their work with friends, family and even future employers. In this session you’ll discover the wealth of Windows Phone based teaching resources available and how they can be used to give students a head start in creating useful applications (including use of Cloud) and entertaining gameplay for the Windows Phone platform, while they are at the same time learning software development techniques.
Creative uses for Kinect in Teaching – with curriculum materials
Thursday 1:45 pm - 3:00 pm
Rob Miles, university of Hull
The Kinect sensor is the "Fastest Selling Consumer Electronics Gadget in History". It is a great way to add a new dimension to Xbox 360 gameplay, able to read its environment and track the body movement of players. It is also a great teaching tool and a genuinely creative device. In this session Rob Miles will show how you can harness this creativity and get students enjoying themselves while writing programs that make use of the unique abilities of this amazing sensor and its accompanying Kinect for Windows software. He will also have curriculum materials to share with you that you can use freely in your own classes.
speaker bio: Rob Miles has been writing programs and teaching how to create them since computers were programmed using punched cards and output came from line printers. Nowadays he much prefers Visual Studio and C#, but over the years he has worked on a huge range of languages and platforms, frequently for money, having worked on projects as diverse as putting dates tamps on Budweiser beer and managing toll collection for the Humber Bridge. He teaches C# programming and Software Development at the University of Hull in the UK; where over the years hundreds of students have suffered through his jokes and picked up some development skills along the way. Rob is a Windows Phone MVP and is also Judges Captain for the Imagine Cup Software Development competition. He has written books on XNA development and the .NET Micro Framework and is presently working on a book to introduce programmers to the joys of the Kinect sensor and the fun you can have with it. He also claims to know lots of jokes, some of them about cheese.
Cloud in a Classroom: Faculty Experiences
Friday March 2, 3:45 pm - 5:00 pm
- Nilanjan Banerjee, University of Arkansas, US
- Chia-Chi Teng, Brigham Young University, US
- Alexander Schmidt, University of Potsdam, Germany
- Moderator: Arkady Retik, Microsoft, Redmond
Cloud computing introduces new and exciting opportunities for computing industry. To realize the potential of cloud computing in higher education, one must think about the cloud as a holistic platform for creating new services, new experiences, and new methods for research and teaching. Pursuing these goals in the current set of the CS courses presents a broad range of interesting questions. Come along to hear about the cloud-based teaching resources available and how they have been used in universities world-wide.
This panel will provide an opportunity for SIGCSE attendees to hear from faculty who have been teaching CS courses using Windows Azure ask questions and discuss and share their own experiences.
- Nilanjan Banerjee is an Assistant Professor at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. His research interests are in the areas of mobile systems, healthcare systems, and renewable energy driven systems. He has been associated with Project Hawaii (aka Mobile Azure) for one and a half years.
- Chia-Chi Teng had over 16 years of R&D experiences in the software industry before joining the faculty at Brigham Young University. He enjoys mentoring undergrad students in research or capstone projects.
- Alexander Schmidt worked in the Operating Systems and Middleware group at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, where he contributed for more than 5 years to the Windows Research Kernel project. Since 2009, Alexander has been associated with the InstantLab project to leverage Cloud computing capabilities for teaching operating systems.