James T. Rowan Jr.
Teaching Statement
Some of the most personally rewarding work I have ever done came from teaching at the
undergraduate level. I found myself teaching pre-algebra to the poorly prepared (many
had never seen algebra), non-traditional student, most of whom would be the first
members of their family make it beyond high school. I found that I could make a
difference in this person’s life. And that they appreciated it. Years later these same
people would stop me on the street and thank me. So, teaching is important, rewarding
work… but how do you make it work for the less motivated traditional undergraduates?
Drawing on educators Dewey, Vygotsky, Montessori and Alan Kay I believe that learning
occurs best when it happens in collaborative setting, is authentic, is personally engaging
and is supported through a carefully crafted scaffolding. While the details of these factors
vary from subject to subject, it presents a particularly interesting opportunity in the
teaching of computer science, especially in the first two years when the danger of
attrition is high. By presenting introductory material in a scaffold-supported, projectbased collaborative manner, students can benefit from the guidance provided by the
scaffold, the less experienced students can benefit from the guidance provided by the
more expert student and the more experienced students can benefit from the experience
of providing that guidance.
Clearly, to be successful, this approach must be supported through the careful creation of
a project scaffolding that allows students to go beyond what they could learn on their
own. Presenting students with a variety of partially constructed project solutions is an
important piece that jump-starts the learning process. Another important, almost
essential, piece is the integration of Mark Guzdial’s CoWeb into the student experience.
The CoWeb is a web server that allows anyone to create and modify web-based content
on-line from anywhere the web is accessible… without knowledge of HTML. The CoWeb
is important because it provides a low threshold web-based place where collaboration
can occur; a central place for all students in the class, a place where students can create
class project web pages, exchange ideas, post questions and view projects from past
classes. This low threshold is also important for supporting cross-disciplinary pursuits
(which in themselves are important for reasons of personal engagement in addition to
keeping CS enrollment up) where the students may not be as technically savvy . When a
class uses and builds a CoWeb it builds a history of itself in the process of being used.
More importantly these class project web sites become a permanent history of previous
student work that, over time, forms its own scaffolding for future classes. It sets the “bar”
and tone of all future work in addition to its providing a permanent public presence for
student work and this public presence is the audience for student work which makes the
work authentic.
While at Georgia Tech I taught 2 sections of the cross-disciplinary Human-Computer
Interface Design and Evaluation course to a mix of Computer Science and Psychology
seniors. Covering a range of issues including basic cognitive science, ethnographic
research techniques, data collection in the real world, research evaluation techniques,
prototyping and presentation techniques; the scope and volume of the required work
make this course a challenging one. Students work in self-selected teams on self-selected
projects and to get them outside their comfort zone, their research participants must
come from outside of the College of Computing. Through iterative design, regular group
meetings, regular instructor consultation and two open-to-the-public poster sessions the
students develop and tune their projects. In one group a student was a Turner
Broadcasting employee and the group developed user software that the Turner actually
adopted.
Mark Guzdial, a professor here at Georgia Tech whose research is in the area of
undergraduate computer science education, has developed and is testing a new approach
to computer science education that I find appealing. His educational philosophy parallels
my own in that authentic, meaningful work attracts and retains students. The approach
is to develop an introductory computer science class that draws on student’s interest in
communication through media. By developing media manipulation software for such
media as audio, video and images students learn about basic computer science concepts.
His first classes were for non-computer science majors and were well received. Students
became engaged in the material because of their interest in communication through
media and questions like “Why is my image routine so slow and Photoshop so fast?”
naturally arose and provided (among others) an authentically produced fore into
discussions of compilation vs. interpretation.
In a similar vein Randy Pausch of CMU has taken the approach that introductory
computer science concepts can be more readily learned if taught using the desktop 3D
world of Alice. The drag-and-drop Alice environment provides a greatly simplified means
of introducing new programmers to OOP language concepts by removing the typical
beginner’s syntax difficulties while providing the visual feedback of seeing actors move
through a simulated 3D world. This approach was adopted by UWG and I have taught
many sections of Alice studio. Migrating these students from Alice to the less syntaxfriendly world of Java for the second and third semesters of programming, though not
perfect, has shown that concepts introduced in this way do transfer successfully.
In my most recent Senior Capstone class I presented a real world problem, that of a
professor’s posted office hours and the accompanying frustrations experienced by both
students and professors. Acting as the stakeholder, I presented the problem to the class
and constrained the solution by requiring cross-platform operation, the use of a touchsensitive panel for input and the use of no proprietary software so that the end product
could be freely distributed. Working as a large team and breaking the development into
smaller groups, the students produced SteppedAway, is a solidly written piece of
software that is HCI sensitive, customizable through a web-based GUI administration
system and logs all interactions allowing it to be used for research purposes.
My Graduate Intro to Database class students learned the basics of database systems by
building, manipulating and expanding a real world derived, small online auction
business application. Writing in MySQL 5.0 the students built and exercised both a local
and a remotely-served database system as the online auction business expanded and
changed; finally adding a front end to the MySQL system that was written in Microsoft
ACCESS.
To me the right approach is to use real world problems, authentic projects that draw on
the student’s natural sets of interest. To attract students to computer science and to
increase retention once attracted, Guzdial’s and Pausch’s play to the student interests
provide the engaging “hook” on which the concepts of computer science can become not
only visible, but interesting and ultimately deemed worthy of study.