{"id":137,"date":"2004-08-19T00:28:06","date_gmt":"2004-08-19T04:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cherrycoated.com\/wordpress\/?p=137"},"modified":"2004-08-19T00:28:06","modified_gmt":"2004-08-19T04:28:06","slug":"starting-the-semester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/teaching\/starting-the-semester","title":{"rendered":"Starting the semester"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Class start this Monday, August 23, 2004, at Mary Washington College of the <a href=\"http:\/\/umw.edu\">University  of Mary Washington<\/a> &#8211; we all know it&#8217;s not the best or even a good name for the U, but it&#8217;s what it is.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s what I do for a living, it&#8217;s my life&#8217;s work, and (occasionally) an all-encompassing passion. Still, with a really enjoyable summer behind me, there&#8217;s a reluctance to get fully engaged before the classes start.<\/p>\n<p>I decided to spend some time thinking about  my teaching &#8211; with only paper and pen handy.  After I got real comfortable in the hammock outdoors, I eventually came up the thought that what I ought to be doing is<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>teaching students what they need to know rather than what I think they should learn<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The point I&#8217;m making is that the courses should be project or problem oriented.  Trying to get students involved in the basic principles and technologies by setting tasks they need to accomplish and\/or problems they need to solve. This needs to be done within the context of a body of knowledge, for several reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Students need a grounding framework they can work within. They need resources that can help them feel that they are on a stable, but not restrictive, path.<\/li>\n<li>Having a context will make it more reasonable to provide examination\/testing\/evaluation mechanisms.<\/li>\n<li>We don&#8217;t need to pretend that the body of knowledge doesn&#8217;t exist. It should be acknowledged<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To start with in<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/people.umw.edu\/~ernie\/cpsc104\/index.html\">CPSC 104 &#8211; The Internet: Technology, Information, and Issues<\/a> We&#8217;re going to be working with a blog. The idea here is that the students will be immediately presented with a task of putting something on the Web. Since the course is also writing intensive, this blog will provide on outlet for the student&#8217;s writing.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/people.umw.edu\/~ernie\/cpsc220\/index.html\">CPSC 220 &#8211; Computer Science I<\/a> On the first day, since we have a lab period, students will have to develop an algorithm, and then implement a solution to the problem of finding the largest of three input values. The algorithm should not be too difficult, but entering the program and compiling it may be a challenge for some.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/people.umw.edu\/~ernie\/cpsc321\/index.html\">CPSC 321 &#8211; Advanced Data Structures<\/a> Here students will be asked to examine an implementation, in Java the language for the course which they most likely don&#8217;t know, of a binary search algorithm. They should be familiar with the algorithm.  Then they have to determine a precise count of the maximum number of probes to determine an element isn&#8217;t in the list. This determination needs to be accompanied by a reasoned exposition of how they developed the statement of the maximum number of probes into an ordered set of N items. Then they&#8217;ll have to write a program to perform the calculation indicated by the formula\/expression they derive.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s the overall plan, and we&#8217;ll see how it works.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Class start this Monday, August 23, 2004, at Mary Washington College of the University of Mary Washington &#8211; we all know it&#8217;s not the best or even a good name for the U, but it&#8217;s what it is. It&#8217;s what I do for a living, it&#8217;s my life&#8217;s work, and (occasionally) an all-encompassing passion. Still, [&hellip;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webliminal.com\/webliminalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}