ITiCSE99

My interests in the conference were first year programming, WWW delivered materials and automated supports and this obviously dictated the papers i saw. I particularly enjoyed the following (in the order of their relevance to me)

• my own talk on RoboProf: see the powerpoint slides (note however that the demo won't run unless you install RoboProf.)
• Michael McCracken's presentation of how Georgia Tech handled 5000 first year programming students. (He was standing in for the authors, one of whom, Jon Preston, also had this to say.)
• Amruth Kumar's entertaining insights into online tests in Computer Science.
• Elliot Koffman gently explaining how to teach Java as a first programming language.
• Linda Stern's illuminating algorithm animations (e.g. quicksort).
• Christian Holmboe's thought's on the students' thoughts while learning Object Oriented programming.
• Jesse Heines' presentation and evaluation of his WWW site.
• Janet Carter's lilting enunciation of the problems or lack of problems with plagiarism.
• Jason Lowder's discussion of WWW based feedback - seemed mainly to be based around email discussion groups.
• the passion of Elena Trichina's talk (unfortunately i was late and missed most of the content).

I eagerly await the reports from the working groups: Validation of the Quality of Teaching Materials, Creative Teaching of Electronic Collaborative Learning Groups and Resources for the Next Generation CS 1 Course.

Note: links to citations come from the ACM digital library where ACM members and affiliated organisations can get the complete papers. The digital Library also contains the index for the ITiCSE 99 proceedings.