Desmond File

Blog archive

Honing Computer Science Education

A few weeks back, Microsoft security expert (and co-author of the book Writing Secure Code) Michael Howard lamented about the quality of young coders coming out of university computer science programs.

In Howard's case, the concern was over the utter lack of security awareness and training among newly minted post-graduate programmers. In fact, the situation is so bad that Howard says Microsoft pulls every new programmer aside for several weeks of security-specific training before they can even begin working on live code.

Security, of course, is an ongoing concern, as reflected in our upcoming cover feature on secure development in the age of Windows Vista (coming in our June 15 print issue). But U.S. colleges face a challenge just getting kids in the door. Since 2000, the Computing Research Association found that enrollment in computer science (CS) programs has dropped 70 percent.

So perhaps it's no surprise that colleges are looking for ways to spice up CS studies, as reported in a recent Associated Press story.

At Georgia Tech, computing professor Tucker Balch heads up a robotics curriculum that includes cheap, Frisbee-sized robots called Scribblers that students program. The story notes that students get to write code to control the behavior of the tiny robots -- a far cry from traditional exercises like cracking prime numbers.

At the University of Southern California, the GamePipe Laboratory offers students a chance to blend coding and creative skills as they study the art and science of computer game design.

Do you think universities are on the right track? Or do alternative approaches like these threaten to undermine core skills and fundamentals that are critical to producing able programmers? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com. If we publish your response in our magazine, you'll receive a free RDN T-shirt.

Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/30/2007


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

    The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.

  • Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

    Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.

  • Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

    Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.

  • AdaBoost Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.

  • Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

    Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.

Subscribe on YouTube