Simulation as a vehicle for project experience

• Authors: J. D. Powell;M. J. Lee
• Venue: SIGCSE '78 Proceedings of the ninth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
• Year: 1978

One of the criticisms directed at many computer science programs is the lack of involvement of the students in “large scale, real-life problems”. Panel discussions between computer science educators and computing practitioners frequently devote a great deal of time to this topic. The practitioners charge that students are frequently presented with well-defined problems that illustrate specific computing concepts. While these problems are important, they do not prepare students for the ill-defined problems they will typically face in a usual job situation. Since a large portion of the graduates from our degree programs move directly into the business and industrial environments, we should seriously consider this criticism. Separate project courses have been described by Khailand and Saxon [2] and by Crenshaw [1]. In these courses, a series of projects are presented to the students. Depending on the size of the class, one or more of the projects are chosen and the class is divided into teams to work on the projects. Classroom time is devoted to organizational structure, skills, and techniques that are important to successful completion of a project satisfying the standards and requirements of the project assignment. Most of the work is performed within the individual teams. The instructor meets periodically with the students to review and monitor their progress. At the end of the course, each team is required to make a formal presentation of its results.