Pander to ponder

  • Authors:

  • Owen Astrachan

  • Affiliations:

  • Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Ponder means "to weigh in the mind with thoroughness and care" [31]. Pander means "to cater to the weaknesses and base desires of others" [31]. We report on a course we have designed and delivered over a six year period. The course was originally designed as a technical writing course for majors, but has evolved into a non-major's version whose enrollment ranks it as one of the three most highly-enrolled and thus arguably most popular courses for undergraduates at our university. We have worked diligently to ensure that students ponder the topics and problems that comprise the material for the course --- and the material is deeply technical at many levels. We have also pandered to student needs in meeting curriculum requirements, offering the course at a time convenient for athletes and others, and using popular media when possible. We started with the goal of engendering interest and passion for computer science and how it affects the world. We report on our efforts to attain this goal while keeping material appropriately technical. We claim our students are engaged in a different type of computational thinking than that espoused in [32, 5, 15]. For the purposes of this paper and discussion we call our approach pander-to-ponder. We provide examples and illustrations of the material we cover, relate it to similar courses at other institutions, and show how we use problems to motivate learning. In the work we report on here the learning is specific to understanding how contributions from computer science are changing the world.