Computer Productivity Initiative (CPI)

CPI for Spring 1996

Old Dominion University, Department of Computer Science

The current Computer Science curriculum must be modified to help students better understand how to apply their education to real world problems. The primary objective of the Computer Productivity Initiative (CPI) is to identify and develop these modifications, portable to any CS program. A multi-year, coordinated project is introduced into the curriculum. Students from several courses coordinate and share information concerning the broad, ill-structured project topic/problem. The courses involved in the CPI project are linked through the tasking of one class by another. The tasking class is always one of the senior CPI courses, while the tasked classes include a sophomore and a junior level course. The two new senior level courses focus on such topics as technical research, market research, presentation skills, group collaboration, interviews, budgeting, proposal writing, presentation tools, scheduling, hardware availability research, system architectural design, requirements specification, simulation, prototyping, and cost estimation. Initial feedback from our students, potential employers and an external board of advisors confirms both that the most successful graduates may not be those with the best technical education and that this effort can provide that additional dimension to the traditional CS curriculum which better prepares students to contribute to the solution of ill-structured but real problems.

Since CPI was designed to be portable to other universities, Instructor's Manuals are available as on-line hypermedia documents.

Recent Publications

• Computer Productivity Initiative.
  Proceedings of the 7th SEI Conference on Software Engineering Education
• Computer Productivity Initiative: Past, Present and Future.
  Proceedings of the 8th SEI Conference on Software Engineering Education
• CPI: CS Undergraduate Curriculum Enhancement through Multi-year Coordinated Project.
  Old Dominion University Technical Report, December 1994
• Presentation to PI Meeting, Salt Lake City, Nov 96

NSF Proposals and Reports

• Computer Productivity Initiative (initial proposal), March 1992
• Computer Productivity Initiative (revised proposal), June 1992
• NSF Annual Progress Report, October 1993
• NSF Annual Progress Report, October 1994

This work is funded by the National Science Foundation under grant #CDA-9214930 and Old Dominion University.

The Instructor's Manuals for

• CS410: Computer-Based Productivity I (new course)
• CS411: Computer-Based Productivity II (new course)
• CS300: Computers in Society (modifications)
• CS250: Problem Solving (modifications)

To view the current Instructor's Manuals, please e-mail maly@cs.odu.edu to obtain a guest account which will allow you to run DHC and view a read-only version of the manuals.

During the Fall 1995/Spring 1996 running of the CPI course we discovered the WEB. Through the urgings and energies of the students, the course shifted away from a PC MICROSOFT OFFICE based system to a WEB based system, exploring a variety of WEB tools. The WEB was used for three main purposes:

• Project Management: Every student maintained a weekly progress report on the WEB, viewable by all students. Information relating to the management of each project was also disseminated via the WEB.
• Project Presentation: The accessibility of the WEB fostered its adoption as the vehicle of choice for project presentations. Most presentation tools (such as MICROSOFT's powerpoint) have WEB publishing assistants. Before presentation could only be prepared and viewed on the in class PCs which were not networked.
• Project Prototyping Because several of the projects (were based on a WEB implementation, it became natural to develop working prototypes on the WEB.

There were three projects which survived the "CPI process" (starting from an initial set of 75 brainstormed ideas).
Click on any of the Logos to access the Project's Home Page

• 
  This is a project dear to the student's hearts since it most directly affected their daily lifes (making it easier to deal with the university administration using the WEB). Several student combined their visions of what such a system could provide. Through the course of the year, the class developed a working relationship with the administration which included funding for a study of Kiosk delivery of WEB services. One of the students on this project was hired by the computing services department.
• 
  This project was to develop a wellness management system which integrated physical exercise, diet and general wellness goals. It utilized a data base of nutritional information which was obtained via the WEB from the FDA (parsed by a PERL program, dumped into an ACCESS data base and accessed through a visual basic program). The prototype can be downloaded from the WEB for evaluation purposes. In many ways this project best exemplifies the integration aspects of the CPI project. Not only were many different platforms and software products used together, but the students needed skills in formal languages (regular expressions to parse the FDA ascii file), data base, user interface, graphics, programming (in new languages)). This project studied different methods of publishing and marketing programs over the WEB.
• 
  This project was undertaken to make the results of an on-going community health project in Diabetes Management sponsored by Alliance Health Systems (known as the CRMI project) available on the WEB. As such it became an important part of that project by helping to define a clearinghouse and resource directory to serve the southeast Virginia diabetes community. This project has led a long term commitment to the CRMI project.

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