Although this course was ""programming intensive,"" most of the programming milestones allowed students to define their own requirements (based on their whims and preferences). However, the programming portion of final exam, along with programming milestone #6, gave students specific problems for which they had to identify and define computing requirements.

Assignment 2: Design algorithmic solution to different kinds of problems, involving arrays and strings;
Assignment 3: Design algorithmic solutions to problems and determine order of magnitude;
Assignment 4: Apply C operations and operators to a basic equation evaluation problem;
Assignment 5: Introduction to functions in C;
Assignment 6: Build the ctype library;
Assignment 7: File processing and error correction in C;
Assignment 8: Building battleship game and using structs and pointers;
Assignment 9: Build the string library

Programming projects in this class actually start to require design of objects. They have several labs and assignments that address this issue.

The development of the SRS including feature descriptions, use cases and models, CRC exercises, DFD and ERD modeling. State Models and Sequence Diagrams.
Focus of the oral presentation.
Sampled on the exams

Students work with their mentors and customers to identify the problem requirements and develop an appropriate solution.

Students overall performed very well on assignments and exams. The following are quantitative measures for each assignment and exam:

HW 1 - average: 95%;
HW 2 - average 96%;
HW 3 - average: 98%;
HW 4 - average: 92%;
HW 5 - average: 98%;
HW 6 - average: 93%;
HW 7 - average: 85%.
Exam 1 - average: 87%;
Exam 2 - average: 85%;
Final Exam - average: 81%.
Term paper - average: 86%.

Note that the average on exams and homeworks were in the B range or higher.

Overall the students were able to work with their mentors and customers to successfully identify the problem requirements and develop appropriate solution. The best example of completing this outcome came from the PNNL sponsored project where the students were able to understand and prototype a 4D data display system in partnership with the Information Science group for a group of Hanford physicists. This application demonstrated a completely new way of thinking about information and its display to a user.

Students learn numerical methods and their application to real-life problems. They also learn the importance of analyzing or testing for consistency and stability.

For their projects, Course projects require students to apply knowledge of artificial neural networks, statistics, and mathematics, using their programming language of choice, in solving problems. are most appropriate for creating a solution.

Students are given application problems in class, as homework assignments, and on exams that require them to identify computing requirements and AI techniques appropriate for solving the problem. They also need to analyze the solution for run time and memory requirements.

Students develop a design document that states and analyzes the problem to be solved, identifies the elements of the solution

For the final project, students define a project using concept formation and storyboarding techniques then apply the computing knowledge learned in this class to creating a final animation product.

A student has to achieve the outcome in design and analysis of algorithms. Again, let's look at the final exam. Problem 2 (labeled as a hard problem) is to design a linear time algorithm for an application. 8 students (out of 14) received full score, and the remaining 6 students received at least 5/10 score. Again, overall on the final exam, almost every problem is to measure the outcome. As mentioned earlier, on the final exam, 8 students received 70/85 or better. 11 students received 63/85 or better, and the entire class (14 students) received 43/85 or better. In summary, the outcome is achieved (at least) satisfactorily by all the students, and (close to) excellently by most students.

Many assignments involve concurrent processes. A typical example is the pipe assignment (lab#6). The students learned to analyze the problem, recognize the need for process synchronization and chose suitable tools for the implementation.

Homework #1 required the students to demonstrate mastery of issues regarding the different types of distributed systems, why to distribute an application or service, different kinds of distributed systems architectures, etc. They averaged 97 out of 105.
Exam #1 required the students to review the above. The students averaged 162 out of 284 (note: I deliberately have low curves on exams, in part because they are hard to finish, mainly because I want to be able to identify exceptional undergraduates whom I will try to encourage to pursue a PhD). I have taught this course 5 times before this particular instance, and have had many students work in the field in industry, and based on their feedback and my experience giving low-curve exams this average is quite satisfactory.

Laboratory experiments 4 and 5 required students to design re-usable routines that could serve as mechanisms used by external devices to gain the processor's use. Problem 4 of homework 3 required students to design a home security system (at least on paper). The students did fairly well in this exercise with an average score of 85 %. In exam 2, problem 3 the students were expected to use the object oriented design approach to design a component of an elevator system, of particular interest was the ability to design a re-usable component. The average score on this problem was 77 %, with the majority of the students failing to produce a sequence diagram based on the sequence of events the component was expected to follow. Of the two laboratory experiments lab 4 was completed successfully while laboratory 5 paused some difficulties particularly the initialization and use of the second processor. The students were however able to document with some details the hitches they had in this lab and why they failed to overcome these hitches.