TECH NEWS

Learning the Art of Creating Computer Games Can Boot Student Skills
Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socio-economic status. Now, computer scientists in the US think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing. They discuss details in the current issue of the International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing.
Nikunj Dalal, Parth Dalal, Subhash Kak, Pavlo Antonenko, and Susan Stansberry of Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, outline a case for using rapid computer game creation as an innovative teaching method that could ultimately help bridge the digital divide between those people lacking computer skills and access and those with them. "Worldwide, there is increasing recognition of a digital divide, a troubling gap between groups that use information and communication technologies widely and those that do not," the team explains. "The digital divide refers not only to unequal access to computing resources between groups of people but also to inequalities in their ability to use information technology fully."
There are many causes and proposed solutions to bridging this divide, but applying them at the educational and computer literacy level in an entertaining and productive way might be one of the more successful. The team adds that teaching people how to use off-the-shelf tools to quickly build a computer game might allow anyone to learn new thinking and computing skills. After all, they explain, the process involves storytelling, developing characters, evaluating plots, and working with digital images and music. Indeed, their preliminary survey of this approach shows largely positive effects. Rapid computer game creation (RCGC) sidesteps the need for the students, whether schoolchildren or adult learners, to have any prior knowledge of computer programming.
Traditionally, various groups have stereotypically been excluded from computing to some degree, including women, seniors and people who don't consider themselves as mathematically minded. Dalal and colleagues suggest that their approach circumvents most of the issues and provides a lead into computing that would otherwise not be apparent.
With RCGC becoming increasingly popular in schools and universities, the team suggests that the next step will be to develop yet more effective teaching models using RCGC and to investigate the conditions under which it works best in improving critical and creative thinking and developing positive attitudes to computing among different groups by gender, age, nationality, culture, ethnic group, and academic background.

source: sciencedaily.com

A Computer Per Student Leads to Higher Performance Than Traditional Classroom Settings
A dozen years into the "1 to 1" computing movement's push to pair every schoolchild and teacher with a laptop, studies show the students in these programs outperformed their peers in traditional classrooms, according to researchers.
Students who have participated in 1:1 computing report higher achievement and increased engagement, according to findings of studies published in a special issue of the Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment, published by Boston College's Lynch School of Education.
The journal's January 2010 edition represents the first-ever collection of peer-reviewed research articles examining the impacts of providing every teacher and student their own laptop computer in school -- typically know as "1:1 computing."
"This new collection of articles brings together some of the best evidence to date on the implementation and impacts of 1:1 computing," said Boston College Assistant Professor of Education Laura M. O'Dwyer, a co-editor of the journal, which is housed jointly in the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative (inTASC) and the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy (CSTEEP) at Boston College.
The journal includes co-editor and Lynch School researcher Damian Bebell's evaluation of a pilot program in Massachusetts' Berkshire County. Bebell found the Berkshire Wireless Learning Initiative produced improved performance in English and writing, though results for math achievement were flat. Overwhelmingly, the laptops got students excited about school.
Bebell said that across all of the studies contained in the journal, one common link is clear: the value of teachers committed to making 1:1 computing work.
"One of the most salient findings was the critical role that teachers played in the success of each 1:1 program," Bebell said. Additional factors critical to student success across 1:1 technology settings included:
Having a strong commitment from school leadership
Developing consistent and supportive administrative policies
Creating professional development opportunities for teachers, particularly the sharing of best practices
All of the studies that examined the impact of 1:1 computing on student achievement found that students in the 1:1 settings outperformed their traditional classroom peers on English/Language Arts standardized tests by a statistically significant margin. Study authors also reported on evidence of increased student motivation and engagement, as well as changes in teachers' instructional practices.

source: sciencedaily.com

Best techies not all Americans
In response to the Perspectives column written by Charles Cooper, "Can the U.S. still compete?":
I have been involved with the ACM Programming Contest since its inception in the late 1970s, and I feel compelled to write you a brief note on your comments related to our poor showing at the recent ICPC in Shanghai.
I think you presented a fairly reasonable commentary, but I think you also need to address the fact that the best scientific minds from our high schools in the U.S. have the option to attend any of the top 50 or so computer science programs in America (with a population of about 280 million). Compare this to China, where the top prospects have the option to only attend the top five computer science programs in China (with a population of 1.3 billion).
A similar picture is true for Russia, India, or even South Korea and Canada, where the best scientific minds attend the top two to 10 computer science programs. In fact, if you happen to be the "brightest" scientific student in most of these countries, your only option is to attend the best school, since almost your entire education will be completely free. Thus, one of their schools can easily field a team of three CS students that will be "all superior" in terms of their mental abilities.
On the other hand, several of our U.S. teams are likely to end up with one superior computer science student per team, and I do not have any doubt that this one student is of equal mental ability to the best computer science student in the world. But that leaves two others in a team who are most likely of lesser abilities. The ICPC is a team competition. All three team members must be of the highest level, mentally, in order to field a winning team.
Given my brief commentary above, it is not really likely that an American university can really come up with the best three computer science prospects for a programming team at the ICPC. China, Russia and other countries can obviously field much better teams of three programmers than any of our top schools in the U.S., given the fact that, in these countries, there is a much higher chance that there will be a concentration of the best minds in one or two institutions.
I guess that I am making an excuse, but this is really what is happening in the ICPC. I do not see any U.S. schools at the top of the ICPC for the near future, unless we do this like the Olympics--field teams by country only.

source: cnet.com

College freshmen less interested in tech
source: cnet.com
Incoming college students seem to have developed an allergy to computer science during the past four years--with women particularly being uninterested in the field.
That's the gist of a new report from Computing Research Association (CRA), a group made up of academic departments, research centers and professional societies.
The study could fuel concerns that the United States may be losing its edge in the realm of information technology, especially when measured against emerging powers such as India and China. The dot-com bust and offshore outsourcing have been mentioned as factors to explain declining interest among Americans in computer science.
Citing research from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, the report says the percentage of incoming undergraduates indicating they would major in computer science declined by more than 60 percent between the fall of 2000 and the fall of 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than it was during its peak in the early 1980s.
Interest in computer science among women fell 80 percent between 1998 and 2004, and 93 percent since its peak in 1982, according to the report, which will appear in the May edition of Computing Research News.
Last fall, the number of incoming freshmen who felt they would probably major in computer science was just less than 1.5 percent of all enrolled freshmen, according to the report.
"Freshmen interest levels at any given point have been an accurate predictor of trends in the number of degrees granted four to five years later," the report said. "It therefore seems likely that there will be a sharp decline in the number of bachelor's degrees granted in CS (computer science) in the coming decade."
CRA said results from its own survey of computer science departments reinforce this argument. The group's survey found that the number of newly declared computer science majors has declined for the past four years and is now 39 percent lower than in the fall of 2000. Enrollments have declined 7 percent in each of the past two years, CRA said.
"With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level," the group said.
The topic of the declining participation of women in IT is prominent among concerns about the future of high technology in the United States.
That decline is somewhat puzzling, in part because women have increased their share of jobs in related areas, such as natural sciences.
Interest in the issue has been spurred in part by a furor over remarks earlier this year by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers. At a conference in January, Summers suggested that innate differences between the genders could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. He later apologized for the remarks.