Abstract
The ubiquity of personal computational devices in the lives of today's students presents a meaningful context for courses in computer organization beyond the general-purpose or imaginary processors routinely used. This article presents results of a comparative study examining student performance in a conventional organization course and in one that has been contextualized using a personal gaming platform as the pedagogical architecture. We find minimal differences in student learning but significant motivation and engagement gains for those in the contextualized course.
- AAUW. 2000. Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age. American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
- Alt, C., Astrachan, O., Forbes, J., Lucic, R., and Rodger, S. 2006. Social networks generate interest in computer science. In Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE'06). 438--442. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anastasi, A. and Urbina, S. 1997. Psychological Testing, 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
- Anderson, J. R. and Bower, G. H. 1973. Human associative memory. Washington, DC: Winston and Sons.Google Scholar
- Blank, D. 2006. Robots make computer science personal. Communications of the ACM 49, 12 (December), 25--27. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bonato, V., Menotti, R., Simões, E., Fernandes, M. M., and Marques, E. 2004. Teaching embedded systems with FPGAs throughout a computer science course. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computer Architecture Education (WCAE'04). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., and Cocking, R. R. 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Exp. ed. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.Google Scholar
- Bruer, J. 1993. Schools for thought: A science of learning in the classroom. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
- Dodds, Z., Alvarado, C., Kuenning, G., and Libeskind-Hadas, R. 2007. Breadth-first CS 1 for scientists. In Proceedings of the 12th SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'07). 23--27. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fleiss, J. L., Levin, B., and Paik, M. C. 2003. Statistical methods for rates and proportions, 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
- Forte, A. and Guzdial, M. 2004. Computers for communication, not calculation: Media as a motivation and context for learning. In Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Forte, A. and Guzdial, M. 2005. Motivation and nonmajors in computer science: Identifying discrete audiences for introductory courses. IEEE Transactions on Education, 48, 2, 248--253. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gay, L. R. and Airasian, P. W. 2000. Selection of measuring instruments. In Educational research: Competencies for analysis and application, 6th ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill. 147--198.Google Scholar
- Guzdial, M. 2005. Introduction to Computing and Programming in Python: A Multimedia Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Guzdial, M. and Soloway, E. 2002. Teaching the Nintendo generation to program. Communications of the ACM, 45, 4, 17--21. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Knuth, D. E. 2005. The art of computer programming, Volume 1, Fascicle 1: MMIX---A RISC computer for the new millennium. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kolodner, J. L. 1997. Educational implications of analogy. American Psychologist, 52, 1, 57--66.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Margolis, J. and Fisher, A. 2002. Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Papert, S. 1991. Situating constructionism. In Constructionism: Research reports and essays, 1985-1990, I. Harel and S. Papert, eds. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 1--11.Google Scholar
- Patt, Y. and Patel, S. J. 2003. Introduction to computing systems: From bits and gates to C and beyond, 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Patterson, D. A. and Hennessy, J. L. 2007. Computer organization and design: The hardware/software interface. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pearson, M., Armstrong, D., and McGregor, T. 2002. Using custom hardware and simulation to support computer systems teaching. In Proceedings of the 2002 Workshop on Computer Architecture Education (WCAE'02). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pintrich, P. R. and Schunk, D. H. 1996. Motivation in education: Theory, research, and applications. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
- Shaffer, D. W. and Resnick, M. 1999. “Thick” authenticity: New media and authentic learning. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 10, 2, 195--215. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Smith, D. 2007. Engineering computation with MATLAB. Boston: Addison Wesley. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tew, A. E., Fowler, C., and Guzdial, M. 2005. Tracking an innovation in introductory CS education from a research university to a two-year college. In Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE'05). 416--420. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Vygotsky, L. S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
- Wilensky, U. 1991. Abstract meditations on the concrete and concrete implications for mathematics education. In Constructionism, eds. I. Harel and S. Papert. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 193--204.Google Scholar
- Wood, D., Bruner, J., and Ross, G. 1976. The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 17, 89--100.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Xu, D., Blank, D., and Kumar, D. 2008. Games, robots, and robot games: Complementary contexts for introductory computing education. In Proceedings of the 3rd Microsoft Academic Days Conference on Game Development in Computer Science Education (GDCSE'08). 66--70. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yarosh, S. and Guzdial, M. 2007. Narrating data structures: The role of context in CS2. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER'07). 87--98. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Context as Support for Learning Computer Organization
Recommendations
Computer graphics in context: an approach to a first course in computer graphics
SIGGRAPH Asia '08: ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008 educators programmeA context for a computer science course is defined to be a field outside computer science in which the technical course context can be used. We use the term "context" because it gives us a way to see how the computer science content and the application ...
Considering mobile device constraints and context-awareness in adaptive mobile learning for flipped classroom
Today, the mobile technologies and Information and Communication Technology development opened the door on new methods and pedagogies of learning. We are talking here about the mobile learning and the flipped classroom approaches. The flipped classroom ...
POGIL Activities for Computer Organization and Architecture: (Abstract Only)
SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science EducationResearch shows that active learning can increase student performance and engagement, but access to materials is a notable barrier to using research-based instruction strategies in CS and Engineering. We present results of a project-in-progress that aims ...
Comments