A recent report by the Computing Research Association http://www.cra.org/ reveals a significant drop in the number of undergraduates majoring in computer science at colleges across the country. Stephen Cooper, a computer science professor at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, is working to change that.
Cooper heads up a creative grass-roots project to reduce the attrition rate among first-year computer science majors nationally. He and his colleagues at several other colleges and universities are collaborating to revise first-year computer science curriculum by adapting existing software to prepare new computer science majors for the specific challenges of the major's required programming classes.
"We're using a three-dimensional interactive animation environment called Alice," he says. Alice was originally developed as an architectural environment-building program for graphic-design students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Through an NSF grant, Cooper was able to adapt Alice to the freshman computer-science curriculum at Saint Joseph's and at Ithaca College last year.
Cooper's approach, and the materials he developed to accompany the Alice environment, are being used this fall by new computer majors at a handful of other institutions across the country, including Bucknell, Duke and Plymouth State College. "Haverford, Wofford and several other colleges will use these materials in the spring," he says.
Alice can introduce students to some of the more important concepts of computer science programming, he says, because visualization helps students better understand a number of fundamental programming concepts. "It offers a very visual environment," he says, adding that the new approach illustrates many of the correlations between programming and animation.
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