A goal-oriented approach to laboratory development and implementation

Curriculum committees of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have recently advocated the use of laboratories in computer science curricula. There is much interest in laboratories and as with any “popular” pedagogical device there is the rush to adopt first and analyze later. Adding laboratories to a curriculum does not automatically make it a better program and, in fact, can make it worse if there is not a clear vision se to the goals that will be achieved by the addition. In this paper we will present a goal-oriented approach to the creation and implementation of laboratories in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. We will summarize a number of issues and concerns discussed during numerous workshop activities and will present ideas we have found successful in implementing closed labs at our respective universities. In the next section, a few terms will be defined. In section 3 we will discuss issues regarding the goals for closed labs and some of their implications. In section 4 we will discuss methods of evaluation and lastly, in section 5 guidelines for the development and implementation of these closed labs will be presented.