Mark Guzdial
Director of Undergraduate Programs

College of Computing
Georgia Tech

Tuesday, February 20, 2007
11:00 a.m., Manchester Hall, Room 241

Media Computation as an Approach to Attract and Retain Students
The research findings on why students avoid computer science or drop out of the program seem to assign much of the blame to what we teach and how we teach it. A common theme of several studies is that students find introductory computer science classes too abstract and lacking in relevance to real-world problems. To address this problem, we have developed a two-semester sequence of introductory computer science courses that contextualize computing education around the manipulation and creation of media. Students in these classes learn about loops by writing programs negating and generating a grayscale version of pictures; they learn about array manipulation by writing programs to splice sounds; they learn about managing larger projects by writing 100+-line programs to generate animations and collages; and they learn about linked-list manipulation by composing music through nodes filled with MIDI notes. The results are compelling: dramatically higher retention rates, particularly among women and non-technical majors, and renewed interest in computing degrees.

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