How to make a 3-D present for your wife
In summer-fall 2009, I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, and Bach. It took me that long. It was full of cleverness, but I think most of the message was lost on me. That’s okay, because I was inspired by the cover image to make my wife a keychain of her initials. Hofstadter carved what he […]
Deskdrawer
Problem: I wanted to record my drawings and derivations on my Android tablet. However, no tools that I could find recorded an Android display at a reasonable speed. Solution: I wrote Deskdrawer to provide a drawing surface that I could mirror on my desktop, where I can record. Check out and download the app at […]
SpecCheck
SpecCheck is a system for computer science educators teaching large classes to get their students’ code in line with homework specifications. With SpecCheck, educators write their reference implementation, tag the specified parts with @Specified, and generate tests for interface conformance that students apply to their own code. Wherever things are misnamed, wherever parameters are missing, […]
Reader-animated storybooks
Proposal
Buster – a budget-minded cluster
Proposal
ITiCSE 2012
Last week I went to Haifa, Israel, to attend the Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) 2012 conference. I presented my work on SpecCheck and ate a lot of pita bread. Here’s what I saw on my visit: Some highlights of my trip included: Coming to terms with the fact that the greatest […]
SpecCheck Questions
What do students learn by using SpecCheck? I wish my purpose were so noble. SpecCheck’s raison d’etre is to make grading easier in large lecture classes. By conditioning student code to better conform to the published specification, we graders are more likely to succeed in running functional tests—which only work if the students name things correctly, have […]
SpecCheck talk at ITiCSE 2012
This is the draft of a presentation I’m preparing to give on some of my work. This text is meant to accompany my slides. Premise This work is rooted on a single premise: grading code for two hundred first-year computer science students is painful. It’s painful for two reasons. First, two hundred of anything is […]