Special Project Awards

SIGCSE awards a limited number of Special Projects to help its members investigate and introduce new ideas in the learning and teaching of computing. See SIGCSE Special Projects for more information and application guidelines.

Read the project descriptions and PI contact information for these recent awards.

Creating a Disciplinary Commons in Computer Science Through the use of Course Portfolios

Josh Tenenberg (jtenenbg@u.washington.edu)
University of Washington, Tacoma
Award: $4,990
Award date: August 2005

The Portfolio Commons involves the collaborative production and peer review of course portfolios by faculty teaching at both 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities in western Washington state. The goals are
to document and share knowledge about student learning in CS and to improve the quality of CS teaching by incorporating scholarly practices for making teaching public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use
and development by other CS educators.

Training to Persist in Computing Careers

Kristi Honaker (pace_nsf@vt.edu)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Award: $4,900
Award Date: July 2005

We will develop a Career Resilience toolkit and training module designed to help students cope with computing career stressors. The project's ultimate goal is to retain minority computing students by encouraging the development of soft skills and coping strategies. The toolkit will include step-by-step modules SIGCSE members can facilitate.

Software Architecture Improvement through Test-driven Development: An Empirical Study

David Janzen (DJANZEN@bethelks.edu)
Bethel College
Award: $4,635
Award Date: May 2005

Test-driven development promises to improves software through both design and testing. This project will perform a series of empirical studies that will examine the efficacy of test-driven development, explore its place in the undergraduate curriculum, and evaluate an educational approach called test-driven learning.

Programming External RAM via a PC Parallel Port

David Heise (dheise@ccis.edu)
Columbia College
Award: $2,000
Award Date: March 2005

This project will create the hardware and software tools for Computer Architecture students to load programs onto the processor they construct for the course from a PC parallel port, obviating the tedious process of programming machine code using switches.

A Course on Ethical Issues in Computing Linking Students at Villanova University and Universidade Nova de Lisboa

William Fleischman (william.fleischman@villanova.edu)
Villanova University and Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Award: $3,400
Award Date: December 2004

This project will support development of course materials and implementation of interactive videoconference sessions linking undergraduate students at Villanova University and Universidade Nova de Lisboa in discussions of ethical issues in computing. The project is seen as a means of broadening the perspectives of students at both institutions

Designing and Evaluating Programs in Computer Science Education

Justus Randolph (justusrandolph@yahoo.com)
University of Joensuu, Finland
Award: $4,750
Award Date: August 2004

A research project to develop best practices in designing and evaluating programs in CS education is proposed. Research activities will include a systematic review of CSE programs and confirm tory case studies of the design and evaluation process of three CSE programs

A visualization system to support software development comprehension: evaluation

Charles Boisvert (cboisver@ccn.ac.uk)
City College Norwich, UK
Award:$4896
Award Date: August 2004

eL-CID supports students' understanding of program development by visualising development history. This project aims to evaluate eL-CID with introductory programming students in a classroom setting. I will build a set of teaching examples and carry out a questionnaire evaluation, analyze forum transcripts and if conditions allow run a crossover study.

Towards the development of "best practices" for teaching information assurance courses

Rose Shumba (shumba@iup.edu)
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Award: $2,853
Award date: July 2004

The aim of this project is to provide some groundwork towards the development of "best practices" for the teaching of information assurance courses. This will be achieved by the evaluation of the effectiveness of available CERT recommended security tools, developing hands-on laboratory exercises for the tools and then integrating the developed hands- on lab exercises and the theories and principles of information assurance courses. A student will be hired to assist with the project.

Projects in Wireless and Ad-Hoc Network Simulation

Chris McDonald
University of Western Australia
Award: $2,700
Award Date: May 2004

This project will extend the existing cnet networking simulator to support the exciting new areas of mobile and ad-hoc networks through the addition of wireless Ethernet and Bluetooth communication links. New laboratory and project exercises, examining table-driven and on-demand protocols, will also be developed

A Remote Program Viewer

Charles Dierbach (cdierbach@towson.edu)
Towson University
Award: $2,768
Award Date: May 2004

This project involves the development of a remote program viewer allowing two users anywhere across the Internet to view a common set of program files and interactively discuss. Such a tool would be useful for both student-instructor interaction, and collaborative learning by students. http://triton.towson.edu/~dierbach/RemoteViewer/Main.htm

Creating Computer Exercises Involving Computer Security

Charles Ashbacher
Mount Mercy College
Award: $1,000
Award Date: February 2004

This project will develop software to demonstrate particular concepts in computer security: code obfuscation and steganography (in this case, the hiding of messages in image files). The final source code and documentation will be released as open source and posted on the SIGCSE web site

Task Force to Develop Java-Based Resources for Introductory CS

Eric Roberts (eroberts@cs.stanford.edu)
Stanford University
Award: $5,000
Award Date: October 2003

This project supports the work of a new ACM Education Board task force to develop a collection of Java-based resources to support the teaching of introductory computer science at both the secondary school and college level

Building Research in Australasian Computer Education (BRACE)

Raymond Lister (raymond@it.uts.edu.au)
University of Technology, Sydney
Award: $5,000
Award Date: October 2003

We propose to run a workshop on research into computer science education (4 days, up to 20 participants). The workshop leads onto a shared research project and publication(s). It will be set in Australasia, and modeled on two successful NSF-funded workshops previously held in America. http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/brace

Bioinformatics in the Computer Science Curriculum

Matt DeJongh (dejongh@hope.edu) & Mark D. LeBlanc (mleblanc@wheatoncollege.edu)
Hope College; Wheaton College
Award: $5,000
Award Date: July 2003

We propose to identify computationally rich examples from bioinformatics that map to core units in Computing Curricula 2001 and investigate ways of incorporating them into the computer science curriculum. We will develop sample course materials that will benefit members of SIGCSE who are interested in incorporating bioinformatics in their courses. http://www.cs.hope.edu/~dejongh/bioinformatics/sigcse/

A Framework for Playing Network Games in CS1/CS2

Richard E. Pattis (pattis@acm.org)
Carnegie Mellon University
Award: $3,200
Award Date: May 2003

I will develop a Java framework (and JavaDoc API) allowing CS1/CS2 students to write games played over a network. Games are hosted on one machine (storing shared state). Manual or automated players on other machines command/query it via strings. I'll write several assignments and sample games to distribute with this framework. Refer to the project home page for current status and additional information: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~pattis/grants/sigcsegrant2003.html

Student Program Documentation Analysis and Feedback

Jesse M. Heines (heines@cs.uml.edu)
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Award: $ 5,000
Award Date: May 2003

This project will produce a publicly available, Web-based application that analyzes program documentation and provides constructive feedback on how to improve that documentation. The final product will be similar in look and feel to the validators on the W3C Web site, but with added guidance on how to correct shortcomings. http://teaching.cs.uml.edu/~heines/projects/docvalidator

Electronic Archiving of Workshop on Computer Architecture Education Proceedings

Edward F. Gehringer (efg@ncsu.edu)
North Carolina State University
Award: $1,600
Award Date: May 2003

Since 1995, approximately ten Workshops in Computer Architecture Education have been held in conjunction with ACM/SIGArch conferences. The proposer has organized the last three workshops (2000, 2002, and 2003). The pre-2000 proceedings are not online or in any other archival form. The proposed activity is to pay a student to contact the authors, obtain the files, and put those proceedings on line with appropriate metadata. Refer to the project home page for current status and additional information: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~efg/wcaes.html