20230612

If any of the links failed, please submit an issue.

One Course

Stanford CS107e: Computer Systems from the Ground Up http://cs107e.github.io/

Yet another course covering a subset of CSAPP, but you program on a Raspberry Pi.

CS107E runs bare-metal (no OS or libraries) on a Raspberry Pi ARM architecture.

It's a small course which is an alternative to the "standard" CS107.

Students work in pairs when they participate in the lab session.

LAB3 Debugging and Testing is worth referencing for debugging-related teaching.

One Assignment

Stanford CS107 Computer Organization & Systems

LAB7 Part II: Ethics Case Study of Therac-25

It's an attempt to incorporate ethics into an engineering course. Students discuss the stakes of bugs in critical medical devices.

One Paper

Randy Pausch. 2008. Alice: a dying man's passion. In Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '08).

Read the Abstract

I have spent the last fifteen years of my life leading an incredible team. Our quest (which we did not even realize in the beginning) was to revolutionize the way computer programming is taught. Current versions of the Alice system (Alice v2.0, and Caitlin Kelleher's "Storytelling Alice") have been very effective in the college classroom and in tests with middle school girls. The use of drag-and-drop authoring to create 3D movies has proved to be a powerful motivator for students of all ages and both genders. In 2008, we will release Alice v3.0, which provides "real Java" programming and the characters from EA's "The Sims," the most popular PC video game in history.

Damn shame I won't be there to see it. As you probably know, I'm dying of pancreatic cancer, as became widely known in my "Last Lecture." Like Moses, I get to see the promised land, but not set foot in it. But the vision is clear. Long before I became ill, Dennis Cosgrove took over the responsibility for the design of Alice v3.0, and he's doing a whale of a job. Steve Cooper (of St. Joseph's University), Wanda Dann, and Don Slater are handling the pedagogic materials for college and high school, and Caitlin Kelleher (now junior faculty at Washington University in St. Louis) is heading the efforts regarding middle school girls.

This talk will address the history, philosophy, and future of the Alice project, and will include a behind-the-scenes look at a pre-release version of Alice v3.0. I will give this address in person if I am still alive and able, or by a combination of pre-taped video and help from the Alice team. I cannot imagine a better professional legacy than what the Alice team is currently building.

It's actually not a paper but an abstract for a SIGCSE '08 keynote, introducing the Alice Project which enables students to learn programming through making movies.

Randy Pausch died of pancreatic cancer. His "Last Lecture" recording is worth watching.

https://www.alice.org/ is the website of the Alice project.