Developing laboratories for the SIGCSE computing laboratory repository: guidelines, recommendations, and sample labs (original) (raw)

Developing laboratories for the SIGCSE computing laboratory repository

1997

We focus on the practical issue of designing laboratory activities, concentrating on identifying key components necessary to insure quality and usefulness in the on-line SIGCSE Computing Laboratory Repository. We summarize the current capabilities and future extensions of the Repository, characterize a variety of qualities necessary and recommended for successful laboratory activities, identify a standard cover page for all lab activity submissions, and specify some guidelines for referees of submitted materials. Finally, we have designed four sample laboratory projects. Their contents are summarized in this paper and the completed projects will be available from the Repository after student testing in the Fall of 1997, if not sooner.

Data collection and evaluation for experimental computer science research

Information Processing & Management, 1984

The Software Engineering Laboratory has been monitoring software development at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center since 1976. This report describes the data collection activities of the Laboratory and some of the difficulties of obtaining reliable data. In addition, the application of this data collection process to a current prototyping experiment is reviewed.

A Laboratory Computer Science Course for Liberal Arts Students

1995

A new laboratory course in computer science for liberal arts students has been developed by the author. This breadth-first course covers 13 topics in computer science in a lecture course, while a co-requisite laboratory course provides lab experience with 13 prepared experiments. The Scheme programming notation is used consistently in lecture and laboratory as a lingua franca for computer science. Students are not taught Scheme programming, but rather, learn just enough Scheme syntax and semantics to be able to read and understand programs written by others. Working Scheme models for each computer science topic are presented in the lecture course and are studied experimentally in the laboratory course. The development of this course and laboratory was funded by the Meadows Foundation and NSF grant DUE 9452050.

e-lab: an online laboratory

The present academic approach suggests that e-learning will become a normal part of the educational practice over time, complementing traditional methods, and that students will expect e-tools and experimental work to be available to enhance and support their learning. We propose a workshop using a scientific resource called e-lab, an online laboratory that we believe that will contribute for the development of a scientific generation of students. e-lab is a great tool that can help teachers to perform some experiments that are impossible to carry out at school either because of lack of material or by safety precautions, for example.

CyberLab: An Online Virtual Laboratory Toolkit for Non-Programmers

2008 Eighth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, 2008

Online virtual laboratory is important for online science education. CyberLab is a toolkit for online virtual experiments. It is able to handle the creation, exportation, and execution of virtual experiments. We believe CyberLab is the first toolkit that allows instructors, who do not know computer programming, to create their own online virtual experiments. This paper briefly introduces the underlying model and the architecture of CyberLab.

Supporting Experimental Computer Science

2012

Abstract: The ability to conduct consistent, controlled, and repeatable large-scale experiments in all areas of computer science related to parallel, large-scale, or distributed computing and networking is critical to the future and development of computer science. Yet conducting such experiments is still too often a challenge for researchers, students, and practitioners because of the unavailability of dedicated resources, inability to create controlled experimental conditions, and variability in software.

A Portable Lab for the Practical Study of Modern Computer Engineering

2020 XIV Technologies Applied to Electronics Teaching Conference (TAEE), 2020

This demo paper presents the µLIC educational platform. µLIC makes available to the students of Digital Systems and Computer Architecture courses a quite simple, intuitive and portable hardware platform for the realization of their laboratory exercises. µLIC can also be used in other related courses, such as Embedded Systems or Hardware/Software Co-Design, which allows reducing the time needed to study the manuals of diverse development boards and tools and to concentrate the education towards the core contents of the courses. In addition, the low cost, diminished size, and portable nature of the µLIC boards enables students to carry a personal unit with them all the time to implement the class exercises also outside the classrooms, as well as hobby projects. In the demo, three typical lab assignments of Digital Systems, Computer Architecture, and Hardware/Software Co-Design courses are used to showcase the µLIC educational platform: a traffic light controller, a 4-bit Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU) and a mini Space Invaders inspired game, respectively. Index Terms-Computer engineering education, digital systems, educational technology, and programmable logic.

Automated Experiments on EjsS Laboratories

Experimentation in laboratories is a key pillar in the education of graduate and undergraduate students, who need to understand the fundamental concepts from both perspectives: theoretical and practical. High costs associated with equipment, space, and maintenance staff, impose certain constraints on resources for traditional laboratories. While, Virtual and Remote Laboratories can overcome these limitations, they present important limitations in their use. Some actions are repetitive in nature, cannot be executed trivially or in reasonable time by a user. Some others might be simply impossible without computer help. For example, doing a linear regression of values obtained in an experiment, performing a comparison of results obtained by making a sweep in the values of a particular variable or taking a system to an initial state. Hence, it arises the need of encoding some experimental tasks to automatize their execution. With other existing applications, to encode experiments, users need to know how VRLs are implemented. In addition, they have to manage the language in which the simulation was created so they need to handle fluently a simulation language just to perform experiments. The authors propose a tool called the Experiment Editor, to undertake automated experiments for VRLs. The Experiment Editor enables the user to encode experiments regardless of the language in which the laboratory was implemented. To do so, it provides a powerful and easy-tolearn language, and the corresponding interpreter that supports the execution of the experiments.