Media Computation: Introducing Computing Contextualized in Video and Audio Processing

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 17:05

The manipulation of pixels and samples to create video effects (like chromakey and the Star Trek ΓÇ£TransporterΓÇ¥) and audio effects (like echoes and reversing), that are commonly used in gaming, serves as a successful context for introducing computing. Several research studies have shown that students find the Media Computation approach relevant and motivating. Experience at different institutions, with several hundred students, shows that the approach leads to increased success in first courses. We have used this kind of approach to teach introductory computing to undergraduates, data structures to undergraduates, some high school classes (like CS AP), and to serve as a bridge from environments like Alice into more traditional programming in Java or Python. The approach integrates well with other innovations, such as IPREΓÇÖs use of Media Computation primitives to process images from the robotΓÇÖs camera. This talk will introduce the approach and describe both the introductory and data structures courses, including a description of some of the algorithms that students implement in the course. I will present some of the evaluation data that we have collected over the last five years.