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Mark Guzdial grounds his research in constructionist philosophy the idea that students learn by creating projects for others to see.
Students learn better when they are actively building something for other people to see, says Guzdial.
In 2003, Guzdial revamped the curriculum for the required introduction to computer science (CS) course for non-CS majors traditionally one of the most unpopular courses on campus. Students responded positively to his new course in media computation. The course teaches relevant programming skills, and the students use these computing skills for communication-based projects.
Students study and create programs that manipulate sound, images, and movies. They write codes to create special effects for photos and movies, splice audio clips, and create Web pages. They use Jython, a version of the programming language Python integrated with Java, similar to that used by Google and Industrial Light and Magic. The National Science Foundation awarded Guzdial’s team a three-year grant to further develop the course tools.
The technology built for the course was more effective than we anticipated. says Guzdial. In their careers these students might need to know how to create computer applications for their own purposes, and this course teaches them the concepts and programming to be able to do that.
Other colleges, including the University of Illinois-Chicago and Gainesville College in Georgia, have adopted the new curriculum and all are finding improved retention rates in the course, especially among women. Increasing the number of women studying computer science is a goal of Georgia Tech and the CS profession, since the field is currently overwhelmingly male.
A high percentage of the students in the new course are actually finding computing to be really interesting, and they’re not dropping out, says Guzdial. They’re creating projects much more complex than required, which is great to see. | 