{"68144":{"#nid":"68144","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Design Education for Non-CS Professionals","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EATLANTA (June 26, 2006)--\u003C\/strong\u003ECollege of Computing Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Programs Mark Guzdial, along with second-year Ph.D. student Brian Dorn, recently won an award from the National Science Foundation\u0027s (NSF) \u0026quot;Science of Design\u0026quot; program. Guzdial and Dorn\u0027s research project titled \u003Cem\u003EContextualized Design Education for Professionals from Non-Computing Disciplines\u003C\/em\u003E will receive $137,114 from NSF for the next three years.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAs computing becomes more common and valuable, non-CS professionals in many disciplines are teaching themselves to program; but what do these professionals really know about computer science? If people begin to use their programs, should we be concerned with the quality of what these non-CS professionals produce, especially when we don\u0027t know if or how they test their programs? How could we effectively and efficiently teach these professionals about computer science and design without sending them to formal computer science classes? These are the questions that Guzdial and Dorn are addressing in their award-winning grant from the National Science Foundation.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EGuzdial and Dorn work within the College\u0027s Interactive and Intelligent Computing (IIC) division, and recently completed a survey of graphics professionals who program but have no formal CS training. Interestingly, these professionals write programs dozens of lines long to control tools like Adobe Photoshop and GIMP. While Guzdial and Dorn found that the professionals\u0027 knowledge of computer science was quite sophisticated in that they all use complex, object-based dynamic data structures, their design process was only sophisticated in some ways. For example, they were very careful in testing their programs, yet rarely wrote program code or comments expecting that anyone else would ever read them, even though they all reported borrowing from others\u0027 code frequently.\u003Cbr \/\u003E \u003Cbr \/\u003EThe next steps in Guzdial and Dorn\u0027s new project will be to devise some techniques for teaching these non-CS-programmers about CS and design in the context of their daily work. The two researchers will then test these techniques and compare the resultant learning to that of students in formal CS classes. This comparison will show how close to classroom learning they can get by supporting \u0026quot;on-the-side learning\u0026quot; in the professionals\u0027 context. When asked about receiving the award, Mark Guzdial said, \u0026quot;This is my first fully funded NSF grant since 2003, so it\u0027s pretty exciting!\u0026quot;\u003Cbr \/\u003E \u003Cbr \/\u003ERead a recent interview with a journalist-programmer by \u003Ca href=\u0022\/\/www.ojr.org\/ojr\/stories\/060605niles\/\u0026quot;\u0022 target=\u0022\u0026quot;_blank\u0026quot;\u0022\u003Eclicking here\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ECollege of Computing Associate Professor Mark Guzdial and Ph.D. student Brian Dorn get NSF support to devise techniques for teaching non-CS-programmers about CS and design in the context of their daily work.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":"","uid":"27154","created_gmt":"2011-06-20 17:13:02","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:09:21","author":"Louise Russo","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2006-06-26T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2006-06-26T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"47223","name":"College of Computing"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}