Motivation: In the late 1990's, the CS department was still teaching the beginning programming courses for majors in C with a text editor and overhead projectors and blackboards. This was clearly not going to prepare students for the way that software was developed in practice --- with object-oriented technology and IDEs. We clearly needed a major change in direction in order to keep up with current technology and practice.
History: Starting in 1999, some computer classrooms became available at UTSA and Cathy Key and I switched the beginning courses for majors to Java and began teaching the lectures in these computer classrooms. I also wrote a curriculum grant with Richard Sinecovic to NASA to support the curriculum development and to fund tutors to staff the laboratories. The grant Changing the Paradigm: Preparing Students for the Computing Profession in the 21st Century enabled us to establish a teaching laboratory for the CS department to support formal labs. We developed curriculum and ran a teacher outreach program.
Workforce grants: We have been extremely fortunate to have obtained support from the Texas Workforce Commission through two Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Grants:
K. Psarris (PI) and K. A. Robbins (Co-PI)
Texas Higher Education Board (Texas Engineering and Technical Consortium)
Developing Computer Science Career Paths
2005-2007, $280,187
K. Psarris (PI) and K. A. Robbins (Co-PI)
Texas Higher Education Board (Texas Engineering and Technical Consortium)
Building Strategic Pathways to the Baccalaureate Degree in Computer Science 2002-2007, $487,102
Curriculum: The current curriculum for the first three courses for majors can be found at http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~javalab During the Fall semester of 2005, I turned over the development of the curriculum and oversight of these courses to other faculty so that I could focus on the software engineering curriculum.
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