CS382:Class Notes

These are class notes for CS328: Discrete Modeling Development. They will be maintained by Kay and Charlie, but feel free to add parts we may have missed.

Friday, January 16

Initial thoughts from the homework reading:

• crowd sourcing - potentially we could do class sourcing with discrete modeling or something else
  • maybe something in Second Life (SL) as a virtual crowd?
  • maybe using an existing large scale model in SL?
• scavenger hunt
• make impressions on people
• high level of engagement in activities
• important points from McGonigal about games we should incorporate:
  • satisfying
  • part of something bigger - make people want to keep going, ie also tie into (mention) other large scale projects - also see next point
  • experience at being good at something
    • want students to try and succeed on their own, but get enough feedback to know if they are heading in right direction

High level goals for the course:

• use computerse to model the world and show that they're useful for the rest of students' careers
• CS is cool/useful

General points to consider for the class:

• We could look at what other liberal arts sciences classes are covering
  • Make sure we're geared also towards potential CS recruits (some non-natural sciences majors) as well as non-science majors
  • Open people's eyes to see what CS can do
• Do we have time to explore some of the technical CS behind the projects?
• What general CS principles do we want to convey?
  • Basic foundations (like abstraction, algorithmic thinking, etc.)
• Should we base units on the science or the tools/methods?
• Possibly multiple parts to assignments, or different options to chose from. Want to challenge everyone at different levels (but don't want them some noticeably easier than others, just different interests)
• Charlie needs to be able to give lots of feedback in an easy way for him to do
  • Possibly many TAs, possibly some specific to a given unit taken from a different department (ie biology student/professor for biology unit, etc.)

Wednesday, January 14

About the class:

• We will be designing a new class “in silico”
• new class will be offered the first time next spring
• geared towards first year students
• lots of this already developed, we’ll be selecting the best parts of which ones for this specific course at this specific college

Themes we're designing for:

• quantitative reasoning
• model development and use
• validation and verification
  • Did I solve the right problem? Did I solve the problem correctly?
• estimation
• visualization
  • data -> information -> knowledge
  • harder to do as go further to the right
  • visualization is one way to make it easier to get more from just data
• mostly the natural sciences, possibly some art
• using tools (spreadsheets, models, make your own or pre-made)

Methods we will use:

• inquiry based learning – find out how to solve a problem and document it, and describe what learned from it
• scaffolded – provide an empty framework for students to work through it in multiple ways
• metric system exclusively
• auto-magic grading?
  • Good feedback is important, possibly part of this could come from a machine

Units/modules (each probably week to two weeks) might include:

• reading
• lectures/discussion notes
• lab

Potential Units/Modules:

• "Seeing Around Corners" – an article about race behavior using Agent-based models
  • Lunch rooms, neighborhoods, etc.
• Possibly a unit with “sensor nets”
• Possible energy unit – EEAP, wind, solar
• Measuring – area, volume, count
• Ground water – wet lab, analytical, in silico
• Genomics
• Measure gravity (as between the roof of Dennis Hall and the ground)
• Something requiring lots of computational horsepower (maybe?)
  • Maybe just mentioning and not an entire unit
  • Maybe tied into the genomics unit or chemistry
• Chemistry, possibly forensic

Other Thoughts:

• We may find things that are really cool but that don’t fit into this particular class we’re designing. However, they may be inserted into various places in the CS curriculum – in POCO, ACS. We should capture them somewhere and Charlie will come back to them another time.