What do playing soccer, buying clothes for a virtual doll and chasing a diamond thief all have in common? Easy, they are all innovative ways students and professors at Carnegie Mellon Qatar are teaching high school students about computer programming.
"We wanted to make programming more fun. More like a game that students would understand and learn from," says Samreen Anjum, computer science rising senior.
The project began last year when computer science professor Hoda Fahmy, Ph.D., was looking for a way to teach high school students about the field of computer science. She began with the Becker's Robots tool, developed at the University of Waterloo, in which students program a virtual robot, giving it instructions to move, turn, pick up things and put down things.
"Using this tool, students can easily check their own work. If the set of instructions you provide the robot is correct, the robot will do what you want it to do," says Fahmy. ''It really gets them engaged."
To engage a diverse student population, Fahmy felt it would be useful to build a library of different themes on the original Becker's model. Since undergraduate computer science students could do the work, Fahmy and post-doctoral researcher Saquib Razak, Ph.D., applied for, and won, two $10,000 grants from the Qatar National Research Fund Undergraduate Research Experience Program.
"The students really took ownership of the project," Fahmy says of Anjum and Rishav Bhowmick. Fahmy initially came up with the "SoccerBot" soccer theme, which was wildly popular with students at the CS4Qatar high school outreach program. Before developing their own programs, Bhowmick and Anjum visited high schools to talk with teachers about what other themes would engage students.
Based on their findings, Bhowmick created a "CatchMeIfYouCan" maze city where a diamond thief is running from police. Anjum created "ShopOut" mainly for young girls, where students use money to buy clothing and accessories for a virtual doll.
Bhowmick and Anjum presented their projects to a class at Qatar Academy, and also used it as part of the Summer College Preview Program for high school students. As a way to get feedback on their work, Fahmy encouraged Bhowmick and Anjum to submit a poster to SIGCSE, the premiere conference in computer science education.
They were among only a handful of undergraduates to present ideas at the conference, which was held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in March 2010. The duo came home from the conference full of fresh ideas and even began a website and presented a poster at the Meeting of the Minds annual undergraduate research symposium.
Anjum says her inspiration to keep working on the project comes from the knowledge that a large number of students are either not applying to computer science programs or dropping out of the discipline, mostly due to fears and trepidation of programming. "I hope these programs help students realize that programming can be fun."
Bhowmick graduated in May, however he is still involved in the project as is Anjum. They are now mentoring several other undergraduates who have also joined the project and will, no doubt, bring new ideas to the world of programming.
