0 Reflecting on Programming

Using Programming to Help Students Understand the Value of Diversity
Michael Wick and Paul J Wagner, University of Wisconsin

"At a predominately-white undergraduate university, how can we instill in students an appreciation for the value of diversity and do so in a way that encourages students to seek inclusiveness?"

From my experience, diversity, depending on what factors you consider can be found or non existent in most computing departments. We are all aware women, Latino/as and African Americans are severely underrepresented in computing fields, but in terms of cultural diversity some may argue that it can be found in computing (in comparison to other departments). In the case of my department, Americans are a minority? Can we ever (expect to) truly achieve diversity, on all levels?

Administered and assessed in an intro to programming in C++ course. The basic idea is to solve optimization problems using a genetic algorithm. They administered a pre and post test to participants.

The project: trivial application - maximize the sum of n numbers using a genetic algorithm.

Ummm...what do you think about teaching genetic algorithms to CS1 students? Don't they already have a steep enough learning curve with programming?

Results

• no control group available
• multitude of uncontrolled factors
• ...
  

I'm not convinced this is a good way to teach programming. While I do think it is important to teach students the importance of diversity, possibly another approach is better ....