CS Education and Teaching Page for Kim Bruce

Kim Bruce's recent courses.

Kim Bruce's papers on Computer Science education available on-line.

Local CS Curriculum Efforts

With Tom Murtagh and Andrea Danyluk, I have been involved in the redevelopment of the Williams College introductory course in computer science (CSCI 134). Our innovative approach uses objectdraw, a locally developed Java library, to support an object-first approach using truly object-oriented graphics, event-driven programming from the beginning, and featuring an early introduction to concurrency.

The project web page includes chapters of a text in progress, several papers, and files containing lecture notes, our library, assignments, and sample programs.

We have developed these materials into a text with the support of a CCLI grant from NSF. They have been tested at a wide variety of universities, colleges, and high schools. The text will be published by Prentice Hall and be available in the spring of 2005.

Involvement in national Computer Science curricula

I've been involved in several different projects involving the design of national Computer Science Curricula at the college level. These include the following:

Chairing the Programming Languages Knowledge Area Focus Group for Curricula 2001. After many of us complained about the omission of Programming Languages as an area in the initial plans for Curricula 2001, a group was eventually formed and I was put in charge (that will teach me to complain!). Unfortunately, the strawman version of the curriculum report still gives programming languages short shrift compared with earlier national curriculum standards. A report produced by the committee, Concerns about the Programming Languages Subject Area in the Curriculum 2001 Draft Report, is available on-line and appeared in the April, 2000, issue of SIGPLAN Notices. The original committee recommendations on the programming languages area is included in the same issue and is available via a link from the on-line version of the report. Those who feel that programming languages is an important core area of computer science are encouraged to read the report and to write to the full curriculum committee.
Creation of liberal arts college curriculum recommendations in "A model curriculum for a liberal arts degree in Computer Science", by Gibbs and Tucker, Communications of the ACM, 29(3), 1986, pp. 202-210. The new updated version appeared in December: "A revised model curriculum for a liberal arts degree in Computer Science", by Walker and Schneider, Communications of the ACM, 39(12), 1996, pp. 85-95. Unfortunately it was delayed in press long enough not to include mention of recent potential languages for CS1 and 2 like Java and Ada 95.
ACM / IEEE Computer Science Curricula '91 recommendations. A summary can be found in "Computing Curricula 1991", Communications of the ACM, 34(6), 1991, pp. 68-84. A paper that I wrote on the report, Creating a new model curriculum: A rationale for Computing Curricula '91 , which appeared in Education and Computing, 7(1991), pp. 23-42, is available on line.

General Computer Science Education

Handbook for Computer Science and Engineering, Allen Tucker, editor-in-chief, 1997. I served on the advisory board and as section advisor for Programming Languages. This is intended to be a great source of material for professionals, but should also be an extremely useful source of material for upper-division students and courses in CS and E.
I was a participant in the education group of the ACM Workshop on Strategic Directions in Computer Science. My position paper is available on-line for comment. A compilation of the reports was published in the Computing Surveys.

ETS Muckraking

I was one of those unhappy about the change of the ETS Advanced Placement exam in Computer Science to C++. I posted a letter of protest on comp.edu and sent a copy to SIGCSE members. I was also a co-signer of a letter published the summer of 1995 in the Communications of the ACM protesting both the change to the APCS exam and the way the change was made.

I wanted to see ETS and its advisory committee to reconsider this change and consider moving the course to Java. The ETS has recently decided to change the language for the AP test to Java. Unfortunately the implementation of this change will not take place until the 2003-2004 academic year. The introductory course developed recently at Williams would be a good model for such a course.

Advanced Programming Languages Education

I gave tutorials on types in object-oriented languages at ECOOP 96 in Linz, Austria, at ECOOP 98 in Brussels, at OOPSLA 96 in San Jose, California, and at OOPSLA 98 in Vancouver. Information and an outline are available online.
I am in the process of completing a monograph for MIT Press with working title Object-Oriented Languages: Types and Semantics. I hope to finish this be the end of 2000. Please contact me if you would like to see a copy of the current draft.

Educational Award

I was presented the 2005 ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education at the SIGCSE Symposium on Computer Science Education in Saint Louis in February, 2005.

Miscellaneous Items

Information on a computing course on web technologies for teenagers given by Duane Bailey, Tom Murtagh, and me at Williams in the summer of 1998 is available.
We have some graduate school advice from some of our recent graduates.

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kim@cs.williams.edu