Developing writing skills in computer science students

INTRODUCTION Writing has always been recognized as an important communication skill, but recently universities have come to recognize that writing skills need to be taught within disciplines as well as in writing classes. The Pennsylvania State University has established a writing-intensive requirement for all undergraduates which must be fulfilled through a course in the student’s college. In order for a course to satisfy the writing-across-the-curriculum requirement, twenty-five percent of the final grade must be based on written work. Such a course has a “W” designation following the course number, such as CMPSC 441W. I was asked to revise the senior-level database course to be one of the W-designated course offerings in the Computer Science and Engineering Department. Before the curriculum revision was due, I had the opportunity to teach the course and experiment with writing. I knew one phase of the writing would be a written design for the database project required by the course, but this wasn’ t new and didn’t constitute twenty-five percent of the final grade. In researching writing requirements at other universities I came across an article by Cote and Custeau [1] describing a magazine of student-written articles they published at the University of Sherbrooke. Together with help and encouragement from Cote and a grant from the Undergraduate Education Office at Penn State, I decided to publish a similar magazine. I required papers from the database students both to fulfill their writing requirement and to use as submissions for the magazine. I ako put out a caII for papers to all computer science students, but I received only one inquiry and no submissions. The purpose of this paper is to describe how writing the papers was implemented in the database course and to describe the process used to select and edit papers for the magazine.