SIGCSE 2007

This year the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education held its Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in Covington, Kentucky, my old home town, March 7 - 10. The conference was excellent, as usual, and I attended two wonderful workshops: "Teaching Objects First in an Enlightening Exciting Manner" by David Gries of Cornell University and "Object Think: Thinking Like an OO Programmer" by Joseph Bergin of Pace University. Both were very interesting with excellent examples and several thought-provoking suggestions.

I also attended the Sun Microsystems workshop "Enhance Operating System Education Using OpenSolaris" and the Microsoft Corp. workshop "Gaming in CS" by John Nordlinger.. Both were interesting.

The keynote address on Saturday during our luncheon was by Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta and was titled: "The Games Computers Play ... Perfectly." The talk was not only informative and interesting but also exciting and extremely enjoyable.

In attendance at SIGCSE were my colleagues from Sweden. I first met them at OOPSLA last fall and was pleasantly surprised to see them at SIGCSE. From left to right, they are Håkan Mattsson, Pär Gustafsson, Millan Lundgren and Fredric Ragnar, all from the University of Gotland.

I think they enjoyed the conference as much as I did. We had a lot of fun talking. This picture was taken in the exhibit area by Fredric Ragnar using his cell phone.

Frank Young and Cary Laxer of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology did an outstanding job registering attendees. They have been doing this for many years and all of us are thankful for their efforts making things run smoothly.

This picture of Cary and the third member of their group, Lynn Degler, shows the good humor with which they carried out their tasks. Though I have long admired their work, this is the first year I took their picture.

This is a picture of me with Beth Simon of the University of California at San Deigo. She graduated in CPS from the University of Dayton in 1995. She has been working in the area of computer science education especially involving the use of tablet PCs.

I also saw Sara Miner More (UD CPS 1996) of McDaniel College. This picture of us was taken at the conference and published on the conference website.

I also met my friend Judith Gersting from the University of Hawaii at Hilo. I took this picture of her at the Saturday luncheon.

My colleagues from Sweden also wanted to experience the cuisine unique to the Cincinnati area. On one evening, we went to a Skyline Chili Parlor and had "Cincinnati Chili." This picture of us was taken by Fredric Ragnar using his cell phone.

On our last evening together, Saturday evening, we went to a LaRosa's Pizzeria. They liked the food at LaRosa's better than the food at Skyline.

I was also pleased to see many other friends and colleagues at SIGCSE, Carl Alphonce, Adrienne Decker, Dan Saks and David Hemmendinger, to name just a few. It should be noted that many many years ago, Dan Saks taught me the C programming language.

Last updated 07/12/2007.