Extending
the Infinity ProjectSM
for Use as a Pedagogical Tool
for Computer Science and Engineering Students
Daniel Waters, Armando
Mora, Lizette Zounon,
Computer Science and
Engineering Department
This paper addresses the issue of how the proven
Infinity ProjectSM program is being
extended to use as a foundation to build freshmen computer science and
engineering students’ knowledge of software and of hardware. The Infinity Project[1]
is a nationally recognized partnership between leading research universities,
industry, government, and educators that has created innovative educational
approaches to modern engineering that are both fundamental and fun.[2] The development of the Infinity Project
material was spearheaded by the Electrical Engineering (EE) faculty at SMU
along with engineers at Texas Instruments (TI), makers of the DSP components
used in the Infinity VAB kit, and Hyperception, Inc., the software developers
for the VAB software to control the DSP.
The Infinity Project provides entering university students with hands-on
access to real-time hardware and dynamic manipulation of that hardware through
a graphical interface.[3]
The University of Texas at Arlington is
implementing the Infinity Project[4],[5]
in its Computer Science and Engineering (CSE@UTA) Department as one facet of a
broad approach to improving retention of students in the CSE majors. This paper will discuss extending the use of
the Infinity Project to a software-focused computer science and engineering
curriculum. In particular we will
address some pedagogical aspects of integrating this hardware-oriented teaching
tool into a computer science program and the type of additional components we
are developing to increase the benefits that computer science engineering
majors will receive through their participation in the Infinity Project.
As with many other engineering disciplines, computer science has the quality of being “a lot harder than it looks” to many incoming students. Thus, retaining students in computer science and engineering majors is an on-going concern. Further, fewer students in the major means fewer graduates in the discipline and fewer qualified citizens to be employed in critical technical areas. In Texas, the high technology industries, though suffering just now from the economic downturn, in general cannot find enough local engineering graduates to fill their needs. This is even more acute in those industries which may have sensitive national security functions and which thus are not open to international graduates from Texas universities. To address this issue, the state of Texas provided funding for universities to use to improve the retention of students in the engineering and computer sciences. The Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Texas at Arlington (CSE@UTA) has chosen to implement the Infinity Project[6] in its freshman introductory computer science course as one effort to improve its student retention rates under this state-funded program.
For CSE@UTA there are a number of advantages to implementing Infinity. First and foremost, it is fun! The experiments are informative and entertaining so students enjoy the time they spend with this set-up. Second, for CSE students this is early exposure to a real-world application of the practice of software that they are beginning. However, there is a distinct disadvantage in using the Infinity Project with students who are software-focused in their academic career because the designers of Infinity went to some pains to HIDE the software such that an Infinity user could manipulate the hardware in a large variety of ways without ever having to see any code. For the electrical engineers, this met their education goals for Infinity. For computer science majors, it leaves a gap between the discipline of study and the tool that they are using.
The Infinity Project was designed as a tool to introduce students to engineering ideas and concepts in an interactive fun way. The initial audience was high school upperclassmen and it has been used with good results in freshman electrical engineering courses at Southern Methodist University. The program is designed around hands-on experiments that demonstrate the basic concepts of electrical engineering utilizing real-time DSP hardware[7] and component-based software that provides a graphical interface[8] and a methodology of developing DSP systems by simply connecting functional block components together with point-and-click methods.
The structure of the laboratory component of the Infinity Project is a series of lab assignments, which include content information, an experimental framework with a set of questions, and the hardware/ graphical interface experiment or experiments. As mentioned above, this structure does not enable students to explore the software behind any of the Infinity Project labs. In order to overcome this particular limitation of the program, the implementation of the Infinity Project in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Texas at Arlington (CSE@UTA) is being extended with additional components that will make visible the hidden software and use it to initiate new students into the power and creativity of software. The approach we are using is a variation on the idea of teaching programming through software “literacy,”[9] in our case, through guided viewing of the code of some of the functional blocks (or modules) in the Infinity VAB graphical interface.
There are three elements of this guided viewing approach. First, as a student begins a lab, the ‘extended’ lab will have a link for the student to see the code of one of the modules, i.e. the functional blocks, which will be part of the upcoming experiment. The visible software will be annotated or highlighted to focus on some particular construct. This will provide an introduction to that programming structure. The second element in this approach is then to have the student execute the experiment and “make something happen” with the hardware. The text of the extended Infinity lab experiment will then help the student make connections between the code they saw and the effect that was created in the hardware. The third part to this guided viewing approach is to have variations on this extended experiment in which the software module that was examined before is now modified. The student has a chance to see the changed code, predict the changed effect, and then, when the experiment is run with this new module, see if their prediction is true. This develops the students’ internalization of the use and meaning of the software constructs.
The Infinity Project is an excellent foundation for this approach to learning about software because it allows computer science students to enjoy an introduction to hardware and engineering concepts at the same time as they are introduced to the critical role of software. Our development of the idea of guided viewing within the Infinity Project began with assessing the existing set of Infinity experiments to pick out a subset which were particularly relevant to CSE majors. Each experiment in this set was then analyzed to find the most interesting module (block) to use as the ‘visible’ software module for the extended experiment to be created and to decide how the code should be highlighted or annotated when viewed. Appropriate text was written to use in the extended experiment which will describe and explain the particular software construct of interest. Parallel to this analysis, we also began to design a framework for the students to view and study the software. This framework will be integrated into each extended experiment so that viewing the code and thinking about software-focused questions will be a seamless part of each experiment.
To promote student learning, we are developing thought exercises for the lab experiment text of each chosen module to link the ‘visible’ software module to the effect it produces when the experiment is run. These thought exercises are software-focused questions which guide the student from particular lines of code in the visible module to the actions that occur as a result of running those lines of code. The final component of our extension to the Infinity Project will be to take a few of the chosen modules and write module variants which modify some specific elements of code within that module to produce different effects when the variant experiment is run. This again guides a student in making connections between the software and the resulting actions by showing how minimal software changes, i.e. making the variant module only slightly different than the original module, can cause noticeable physical differences in the results that can be seen or heard or experienced.
This approach to making the software of Infinity visible is currently in development here at UTA with the assistance of the software engineers at Hyperception, Inc. We are also preparing to implement the software-focused labs that will aid the students in becoming literate with software and developing their understanding and their intuition about what software can do. By extending the Infinity Project as described we anticipate that this hardware-oriented teaching tool will become an excellent pedagogical instrument to introduce new computer science engineering majors to the fundamental nature of software and to the fun of using and understanding it.
[1] Welcome to the Hyperception VAB for
University Web Site, http://www.hypersignal.com/VAB_Univ/
[2] Overview of the Infinity Project,
http://www.infinity-project.org/home.html
[3] Building DSP Applications via Graphical Design - “Does a picture ‘cost’ a thousand words?”. Copyright Hyperception, Inc. 2001.
[4] Fourteen Universities In Texas To Work Together To Increase The Number Of Engineering Graduates, http://www.smu.edu/newsinfo/releases/01286.html.
[5] The implementation of the Infinity
Project in CSE@UTA is funded through a grant from the Texas Engineering
Education Pipeline.
[6] Fourteen Universities In Texas To Work Together To Increase The Number Of Engineering Graduates, http://www.smu.edu/newsinfo/releases/01286.html .
[7] The use of Real-time DSP in Education
made possible with VAB. Jim Zachman.
Ninth DSP (DSP 2000) Workshop, First Signal Processing Education (SPE
2000) Workshop, IEEE Signal Processing Society, October 15 - 18, 2000, Hunt,
Texas
[8] Building DSP Applications via Graphical Design - “Does a picture ‘cost’ a thousand words?”. Copyright Hyperception, Inc. 2001.
[9] What are we doing when we
teach programming? Sally Fincher, In Frontiers
in Education '99, pages 12a41-5. IEEE, November 1999.
ARMANDO MORA
Armando Mora is an undergraduate research assistant for the
Infinity Project implementation in the Computer
Science and Engineering Department (CSE) at the University of Texas at
Arlington (UTA). He is a junior
pursuing a CSE degree.
DANIEL WATERS
Daniel Waters is a
junior pursuing a CSE degree and an
undergraduate research assistant for the Infinity Project implementation in CSE at UTA. He is also currently a software designer for K Solutions, Inc.
and has published several articles on ASP and other topics.
LIZETTE ZOUNON
Lizette Zounon is an undergraduate research assistant for
the Infinity Project implementation in the Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) at the
University of Texas at Arlington (UTA).
She is a junior pursuing a CSE degree and also works in the University
Math Clinic as a tutor.
J. CARTER
MATHENEY TIERNAN
Dr. Tiernan
is a Lecturer, an Undergraduate Advisor, and the CSE Director of Outreach in
the Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) at the University of
Texas at Arlington (UTA). She is the
Principal Investigator for the implementation of the Infinity Project in CSE at
UTA. Her areas of interest include
engineering pedagogy, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. Dr. Tiernan previously worked as a software
design engineer for Texas Instruments and as a Coordinator and National Liaison
for Project SEED, a national mathematics teaching organization.