Achievement

Computational Thinking (taught by M. Stone) is an IGERT-created course that teaches the theory of programming and computational modeling to a group of interdisciplinary students with no formal training in computer science. Students completed projects on finite state machines, alternative representations, search, string matching and Turing machines. Students created a web interface to a database as a simple exercise in practical creative team programming. The material was particularly useful to students interested in text processing, information management and computational perception. Students’ projects were much more ambitious than in previous years and students were able to contribute code and design more evenly. The diverse backgrounds of students is a challenge, so in the next offering we will ramp the difficulty of exercises up more gradually and interleave the algorithmic and theoretical material with examples from HTML and databases. We will form teams earlier, so that student