Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

Intelligent Systems Development In A Non Engineering Curriculum, Emily Brand, William Honig, Matthew Wojtowicz

William L Honig

Much of computer system development today is programming in the large - systems of millions of lines of code distributed across servers and the web. At the same time, microcontrollers have also become pervasive in everyday products, economical to manufacture, and represent a different level of learning about system development. Real world systems at this level require integrated development of custom hardware and software.

How can academic institutions give students a view of this other extreme - programming on small microcontrollers with specialized hardware? Full scale system development including custom hardware and software is expensive, beyond the range of any …

Teaching And Assessing Programming Fundamentals For Non Majors With Visual Programming, William Honig

William L Honig

Visual programming tools and mobile device applications are a natural tool to engage university students; but, are they effective in teaching quantitative thinking skills to non computer science majors? Answering this question can be based on careful assessment of the learning outcomes. This paper reports the results from teaching over 100 students mobile app development with App Inventor in a university core course. Results were measured using an assessment process motivated by Bloom's Taxonomy that included student self assessment, ratings by instructors, and comparisons of the two results. The categories in the assessment were mapped to specific levels of skills …