Houston, Texas USA March 1-5, 2006

Mark D. LeBlanc, Wheaton College
Betsey D. Dyer, Wheaton College

In a series of team-taught mini-lectures followed by hands-on activities, participants will learn how to introduce, motivate, and explain DNA sequence analysis by engaging in "word play" using regular expressions on English texts and then DNA sequence. Faculty wishing to experience an introductory but focused look at DNA sequence analysis and its place as a rich source of state-of-the-art applications are especially encouraged to attend. Participants will take away a series of classroom tested specifications used in a variety of computer science courses at various levels in the curriculum and consider strategies for starting collaborations with biology and other science faculty at their home institution. Participants will alter some Perl, but no prior knowledge of Perl is required. Participants will bring their own laptops pre-loaded with workshop materials (LAPTOP).

Andrew Begel, UC Berkeley
Rebecca Bates, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato
Steven A. Wolfman, Univ. of British Columbia

This workshop will focus on kinesthetic learning activities, i.e., physically engaging classroom exercises. These might, for example, teach recursion by simulating the Towers of Hanoi with students instead of disks, or demonstrate the efficacy of various hash functions by sorting students by (numerical) characteristics such as birth month. The workshop will begin with a brief kinesthetic learning activity to motivate the value of these activities. We will follow with a variety of examples, and discuss how to deploy these in a classroom. Most of the workshop will be devoted to facilitated group work to help the participants design, test and evaluate their own activities. All KLAs will be posted to http://sequoioa.cs.berkeley.edu/kla/.

Paul J. Wagner, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire
Daren Bauer, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire
Thomas Paine, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire
Andrew Phillips, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire
Jason Wudi, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire

This is the second of two workshops for CS educators developing curricula in computer security. Participation in workshop part one is recommended as a prerequisite. We provide guided hands-on instruction and experimentation on both defensive techniques and the understanding of exploits for the purpose of better defending systems. The session concludes with a hands-on exercise giving the participants an opportunity to participate in a carefully constructed and monitored cyberwar scenario; i.e. the participants will harden their systems, identify potential exploits and threats, and work to understand the mindset of the attacker by identifying weaknesses in all systems on the network.

Zach Dodds, Harvey Mudd College
Doug Blank, Bryn Mawr College
Paul Rybski, Carnegie Mellon University

This workshop will be a hands-on opportunity to assess several emerging software, hardware, and curricular resources that further the capabilities and roles of robots within the undergraduate CS curriculum. We will present and guide participants in trying (1) Pyro, a free, python-based software abstraction that facilitates interaction with robots and robot simulators for students of all experience levels; (2) Sony's AIBO and CMU's TeRK, medium- and low-cost hardware platforms that are seeing increased use at the undergraduate level; (3) several curricular modules and student-research projects based on these resources (LAPTOP).

Joe Hummel, Lake Forest College

Microsoft .NET is an exciting framework for programming not only on the Windows platform, but MacOS and Linux as well. This workshop will introduce attendees to .NET programming, in particular with regards to building console-based, GUI, and database-driven applications appropriate for students. Both command-line tools (free) and Visual Studio .NET will be demonstrated. The purpose of this workshop is to introduce .NET, allowing attendees to evaluate its use in a CS or IS curriculum. PowerPoint presentations will be example-based using VB and C#, and suitable for student distribution; attendees will have access to electronic copies of all workshop materials.

Bettina Bair, Ohio State University
Cinda Heeren, University of Illinois
Peter B. Henderson, Butler University
Cary Laxer, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Gloria Childress Townsend, DePauw University

Hosting a regional celebration can be a powerful way of creating connections among women and underrepresented groups in computing. Yours can vary in size, focus and length. Based on our experience, we can help you establish realistic goals, identify your target audience, create a feasible timeline and budget, secure financial support, select and manage your conference site, promote your event, solicit for participation, automate registration and assessment. You'll also learn what kinds of problems to expect and how to deal with them. You'll receive a 'Best Practices' booklet and worksheets for planning your own regional celebration.

Brian Loomis, Microsoft Corporation

This workshop will describe the tools, processes and techniques used in integrating web services and applications in a service-oriented architecture. Materials will be presented using business examples but will be appropriate for teaching an upper-level course in internet technologies, distributed applications, or systems architecture. We will talk specifically about the internet standards (XML, XSD, web services) and the architectural framework of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and demonstrate typical usage. We will discuss the emerging technologies around web service enhancements (WS-E, security, transactions) as well as software modeling (UML) techniques which provide basic functionality for integrating applications (LAPTOP).

Jeffrey L. Popyack, Drexel University
Bruce Char, Drexel University

Tablet PC's feature a stylus capable of inputting a data type called Ink. Ink has many characteristics that allow freehand pen annotation, editing, handwriting recognition, and text search. Microsoft's Tablet PC Software Development Kit (SDK) allows development of Windows-based applications for Tablet PC's with Visual Studio .NET, which includes a full set of graphical user interface and Ink manipulation tools. This introductory-level workshop includes a brief overview of the Tablet PC development environment, resources available for developers, and instruction on using the SDK, with suggestions for usage in software design and team projects throughout the computer science curriculum.

Barry Burd, Drew University

Testing is an essential part of the software development process. So we should teach students a solid testing methodology. One such methodology is unit testing. With unit testing, the programmer tests each piece of code before adding the code to an application. We should also give students tools to automate the testing process. JUnit is the most widely used unit testing tool among professional Java programmers. Using JUnit, a programmer creates rigorous tests, instruments existing code, and runs a formal test suite. JUnit itself is free, open source software. This workshop covers JUnit and its use in undergraduate computer science courses (LAPTOP).

Stephen Cooper, Saint Joseph's University
Wanda Dann, Ithaca College

This introductory workshop, designed for instructors with minimal to no prior experience with Alice, offers hands-on experience programming with Alice. Alice is a powerful program visualization tool enabling students to "see" objects and work with object-oriented programming. Participants will learn how to use Alice to build virtual worlds and how to use this approach in introductory-level computing courses (introductory programming for majors, programming for non-majors, computer literacy, etc.) at the college or high-school level. Participants will receive a CD containing the latest version of the software and sample virtual worlds developed as part of NSF-0126833/NSF-0339734 (OFFSITE).

Amruth N. Kumar, Ramapo College of New Jersey

In this workshop, we will discuss how to use LEGO robots to assign projects on traditional topics in AI. We will discuss robot projects on topics such as search, expert systems and neural networks: the design, logistics, implementation options, and guidelines for hardware, software and props for the projects. Participants will work through the Java solutions of two projects - complete, compile, download and execute them on LEGO robots to get a hands-on feel. This workshop will be of interest to instructors who would like to use robots for projects in their AI course. Knowledge of Java is beneficial (OFFSITE).

Tom Naps, U Wisconsin. Oshkosh
Myles McNally, Alma College
Scott Grissom, Grand Valley State University

Participants will learn how to use materials developed by the presenters under a NSF EMD grant. These materials, along with the supporting software system (JHAV'E), emphasize pedagogy instead of technology. Topics covered will include best practices in using algorithm visualization (AV), fostering student engagement with AV, and the design of effective instructional AV. Hands-on activities will allow exploration of numerous visualizations already developed and, to a lesser degree, creating new visualizations in the JHAV'E environment. Participants will receive the draft of an AV-based lab manual and be invited to a more intensive follow-up summer workshop funded by the NSF grant (OFFSITE).

Olly Gotel, Pace University
Richard Kline, Pace University
Christelle Scharff, Pace University
Andrew Wildenberg, Cornell College

WeBWorK (http://webwork.math.rochester.edu) is a free open-source formative web-based assessment system to generate, deliver and grade homeworks, and distribute their solutions. It emphasizes online feedback and retesting opportunities to master learning. This workshop will explore the use of WeBWorK for teaching programming fundamentals. Attendees will experiment with the student and instructor WeBWorK interfaces, and write their own customized WeBWorK problem sets (with their solutions, grading schemas and deadlines) in the Problem Generating (PG) macro language. The developed WeBWorK problems will go from simple True/False, multiple-choice and matching problems, to more sophisticated problems testing program correctness using a WeBWorK plug-in interfacing WeBWorK with JUnit (OFFSITE).

Copyright © 2005 ACM SIGCSE -- Revised: March 2, 2005