Editor: Keith Davis Writers: Dave Maley Publisher: Office of Public Information Volume 22, No.12   February 28, 2000

NSF Grant Offers Students Hands-On Experience Developing Software John Barr, associate professor of mathematics and computer science, and a colleague, Laurie Smith King, formerly of Ithaca College and now an assistant professor at Holy Cross, recently received an award of $74,000 from the National Science Foundation. The grant will help the professors and their student research teams develop a teaching tool that could change the way computer programming languages are taught. The tool is a software package called Multiple Language Environment (MuLE). The grant will allow Barr, King, and their research groups to extend the MuLE software to more languages and platforms as well as enable the creation of a more intuitive and usable interface. "It’s very hard right now to teach a programming language course," Barr says. "If we spend a lot of time talking about the implementation of the languages, we don’t have a lot of time to focus on the languages themselves. On the other hand, if we concentrate on the languages as objects of study, we don’t have much time to discuss the coding underneath them. There hasn’t been any time to combine those two efforts." The MuLE software has the potential to change that. "MuLE has a simplified version of the computer language being studied," Barr says. "MuLE lets you learn how to use the language, but the code is simple enough so that you can understand what’s beneath the language and how it’s implemented." Barr plans to use the grant money to refine the software to the point where it can be used by a larger audience. Crucial to that effort will be the work of the student researchers. Four of them — Christian Stoehr ’01, James Scheinblum ’02, Laura Henry ’01, and Hanh Pham ’01 — are from Ithaca College. Four others are from Holy Cross. "Combining the study of computer languages and the implementation of those languages in one course is pretty much unique right now," Barr says. "Not only do we now have a chance to make this software available to the whole computer science community, we also have the resources to give students the experience of working on a real-life, long-term software project." Barr hopes that by the fall the researchers will have developed the software to the point where they can start writing a manuscript to be published as a lab manual or an accompaniment to another text. "It’s still early as to where it’s going to go," Barr says. "But I can already see rewards. There’s a lot of intellectual banter going back and forth between the students, and it’s fun for me to see them get so excited about a project. It’s going to be good experience for them in a lot of ways, including a very practical one. At a job interview, what’s the first question an interviewer is likely to ask? ‘What have you done?’ These students will have a very good answer." The National Science Foundation is an independent U.S. government agency responsible for promoting science and engineering. Each year, NSF receives approximately 30,000 new or renewal support proposals and makes approximately 9,000 new awards, typically to universities, colleges, academic consortia, nonprofit institutions, and small businesses. Photo by Keith Davis

ITHACA | Back Issues | Table of Contents | NEWS Home | Publication Schedule | Letter to the Editor Created by Andrejs Ozolins. Updated 25. .Feb. 2000