I joined Capitol College in the Fall of 1999 as a computer science faculty member (and occasional math faculty member). It is amazing how quickly and how much our course offering in the CS curriculum has evolved since then.
When it comes to teaching computer science, we have to keep up with the times, stay alert to new developments and keep learning new topics. I remember when I first taught, in the Spring of 2000, our newly created web programming course “Web/CGI programming using Perl.” I was excited to teach the class, and the students in the classroom were excited to learn something they could relate to and something that was directly applicable to the industry.
Since then, the web has become an enormous part of peoples’ lives. How businesses conduct business. How entrepreneurs can start companies. Little did I know at the time that the course would be obsolete several years later, and we would replace it progressively with three web programming courses: PHP/JSP/Servlets, .NET/C# and JavaScript.
Things indeed move quickly in the world of computer science. And of course the mobile computing revolution has been upon us now for several years. That is one nice thing about being a faculty member in a small technology college: we can discuss things and make decisions quickly, add courses and support infrastructure very quickly. And all of the sudden, we can offer iPhone app development, Android development and soon game programming on the iPhone and iPad platform.
As we offer that type of course, it is also very rewarding for faculty to watch the students’ interest, motivation, and expertise grow and develop; often we can tell from talking with them that they are also learning a lot outside the classroom. It is a nice sight to see our students prepare for the real world. Sometimes it gets even better: some of our students, in their senior year, before earning their degrees, are getting full-time jobs with full-time pay at renowned corporations.
Some students come to the classroom with a lot of preexisting knowledge, and that is particularly true for some of our computer science courses, and even truer for web programming courses. Not only do they have their own websites, but they often know and use PHP, javascript and CSS on their websites, in addition to HTML. That, coupled with the small size of our typical classroom, provides opportunities to enhance a course with more interesting projects.
This semester I decided to do a large web project with the students in the classroom. Something that is real, that will be useful for the college, and that I hope will be a great experience for the students, from start to finish. As the college recently completed another ABET accreditation visit, we will be setting up a website to manage ABET data generated by faculty; this will be a web-based, multi-user piece of software with persistent data. The site will be accessed by both administration and faculty users with different privileges. Hopefully, it will work out well.