Nifty Assignments and the ACM Digital Library

The last Rocky Mountain CCSC presentation demonstrated the use of games and creative solutions in Nifty Assignments.

Are you interested in how students solve problems using a variety of games? Visit the ACM Digital Library. to read how they used Hunt the Wumpus (updated to Hunt-the-Terrorist), football scores, maze creation, anagrams, stable pairings and Missile Command for class assignments. The Rocky Mountain CCSC has offered Nifty Assignments for the past few conferences and this year, offers a paper for those who were unable to attend.

Due to the multiple conference tracks, I missed some wonderful presentations and workshops. For more information, use the titles listed in the CCSC Rocky Mountain Conference program and visit the ACM Digital Library.

jGRASP: Teaching Hard Concepts with Intuitive Visualizations at the CCSC

Dr. James Cross presented jGRASP, the Java virtual machine version of the Graphical Representations of Algorithms, Structures and Processes in his workshop jGRASP: Teaching Hard Concepts with Intuitive Visualizations at the CCSC Rocky Mountain Conference held at Colorado Technical University (CTU).

jGRASP is funded by a National Science Foundation grant. Previous research on GRASP was supported by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Defense Information Systems Agency DISA) and Lockheed Martin.

Download and use a free copy of jGRASP and the tutorials in Windows, Mac or Linus formats. This visual tool is easy to use by dragging and dropping program elements into a viewer window.

CCSC Workshop on Animated Database Courseware and Gamemaker for Game Development

Yesterday at the CCSC Rocky Mountain Conference at CTU, Dr. Mario Guimaraes led a riveting presentation of how they use the 2D game design tool Gamemaker in An Exploratory Overview of Teaching Computer Game Development. He noted that Gamemaker is available by a free download. It is easy for students to use and best for designing 2D games.

Today, his workshop on Incorporating Animation Courseware into the Teaching of Complex Database Concepts: Conference Workshop demonstrated how to integrate Flash and Java to animate the entity-relationship notations to depict various ways of learning how to model and understand a relational database design. Visit the Animated DataBase Courseware research site to experience animated instruction and the assessment of advanced database concepts.

CCSC Rocky Mountain Conference 2008 at Colorado Technical University

Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Rocky Mountain Conference were presented October 17-18, 2008 at Colorado Technical University in Colorado Springs. The CCSC conference was hosted in conjunction with the Institute for Advanced Studies' doctoral residency at Colorado Technical University.

The subjects ranged from the use of games in education, such as Neverwinter Nights in Learn These Sums or Die, Using the Ancient Game of Rogue in CS1 and Alice to accessibility tools for blind students and ethics in technology.

Congratulations to my co-authors Steven Endorf, Dawn Frankovich and Johnny Sandaire for their work on our paper entitled A Virtual Environment for Designing User Interface Prototypes. Our presentation on Slideshare was lively as we integrated slides and a Second Life (SL) session to demonstrate the class projects and SL's powerful project creation tool.

It was a great opportunity to demonstrate the accomplishments of CTU students who studied and created projects within the virtual world of Second Life during the Winter 2008 offering of CS 820 Usability and Interaction. Many thanks to Dawn and Steven for presenting their work at the conference as they were not required to attend this term's doctoral residency.

Our Keynote speaker, Kevin Cox, from Microsoft's SQL Server Product Group, discussed the Technology for Very Large Databses, citing his case study for the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-Starrs) project.

James Morgan's presentation of statistics from a study he conducted on The Development of Student Perceptions of Ethical Issues in the Use of IS segued nicely into our banquet presentation.

Keynote speaker Dr. David Teneyuca, Dean of Information Technology at CTU Online, discussed Ethics and Technology. He offered riveting examples of inappropriate use that ranged from robot sex to how technology may be influencing a shift in ethics and values.

We appreciated Site Chair Dr. Bruce Harmon's efforts in hosting the conference at CTU and the CCSC Rocky Mountain Steering Committee's hard work in organizing the papers, publication, sessions and future events. Attendees enjoyed the generous donations from the vendors and sponsors who distributed Cenage canvas bags, Pearson Education textbooks, literature from Colorado Technical University and made this wonderful learning experience possible.

My loot bag included two new books on usability and interaction! *grins*

For more information on tomorrow's conference sessions, visit the CCSC 17th Annual Rocky Mountain Conference.

If there are papers that you would like to read from this conference, use the session names from the CCSC program to review them in the ACM Digital Library.

Note: The images included in this post are by C. Calongne. The first four depict the projects from Winter 2008 CS 820 in Second Life and the last photo includes projects from several classes in Second Life.