About the JR Site |
The goal of this project is to rethink computing education along experiential lines. Whether it is computer science, engineering, or some other computing program, start by immersing the foundational computing concepts in a rich context (such as HTML5 or Mechatronics) and let students engage with the application and its benefits while subliminally constructing mental models. As the maturity level increases, expose richer applications (such as mobile or cyberphysical) to scaffold these models. Then, and only then, can a formal coverage of computing fundamentals begin.
In EECS (in Lassonde@YorkU) this approach has been implemented through the course pair 1011 and 1021 for engineers, and 1012 and 1022 for non-engineering programs. The strategy is the same in both but the immersion medium is different. For engineers, they start with sensors and actuators controlled by a Matlab program, and then move to cyberphysical systems controlled by a Java program. The switch of programming language help distill the underlying concepts and purify the constructed mental models about variables, expressions, types, control structures, modularity, and delegation. Non-engineering programs follow a similar route but they start with html and css pages controlled by JavaScript programs, and then move to mobile Android apps developped in Java.
These two programs merge in the second year in the course EECS2030 which takes a formal look at OOP, recursion, algorithms, and basic data structures.
This site is the brainchild of michael Jenkin & hamzeh Roumani |