Department of Computer Science, University of Northern Iowa

News & Announcements

May 15, 2007
Department Proposes New Courses, Testing Certificate

The department has proposed several changes to its curriculum, in particular some new courses and a new certificate program in Software Testing. Here is a quick summary of the major elements of the proposal:

Software development is the fastest-growing sector of the job market, and a large part of the software development effort lies in testing. The proposed 15-credit Software Testing Certificate program will give students from other disciplines the foundation they need in software development and testing skills in order to understand the technical aspects of software testing. Students will take Visual Basic, Discrete Structures, Software Testing, and new courses in Applications Skills for Software Testing and Software Requirements Analysis. For more details, see this description.
Every student who graduates from a univesity today should be well-grounded in computational thinking, which permeates our world and changes how nearly everyone works. In particular, computing changes how we think about problems quantitatively. To address this need, the department is proposing 810:025 Computational Modeling and Simulation, a no-prerequisite course suitable for all UNI students. This course explores computational approaches to solving complex problems using various computational tools, including data modeling and discrete simulations.
Undergraduate CS majors enjoy reaching our upper-division courses, where they learn about the more advanced workings of computer systems. To help students be ready for those courses sooner, the department is making some changes to its core courses CS I-II-III. The most important of these is to move Data Structures from the third course to the second and object-oriented design from the second course into the third. Data Structures will remain the primary prerequisite for the upper-division.
As a part of reorganizing the core courses, the department will begin to offer a variety of language tracks in its Intro/Data Structures sequence. In recent years, the first two courses have featured Java or C/C++. In the future, the first two courses may teach other languages as well, such as Ada, Python, or Ruby.

Approval of the department's curriculum proposal is pending. If approved as expected, the new curriculum will go into effect in the Fall of 2008.

FACULTY PROFILE

With distributed computing, the devil is in the details. That's because a programmer is dealing with all sorts of different hardware and networks. Meshing all of these elements presents a significant challenge that Paul Gray, associate professor of computer science, is leading the charge to solve... [more]

More Profiles

PROJECTS/GROUPS

More Projects