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INTEGRATION OF INDUSTRY INTO COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION

Ali Sekmen

Department of Computer Science Tennessee State University Nashville, TN

Abstract

The Department of Computer Science (DoCS) at Tennessee State University (TSU) has actively been involved in integrating industry into computer science education. Our main goal is to strengthen partnership among businesses and our department through participation in project- based learning and teaching experiences with real-life business problems. In this process, business/industry partners come together with faculty members to design projects for the courses we offer. A typical project for a course is shaped with collaboration of the faculty and the corresponding industry partner for that course to fit it into the course contents and objectives. Industry partners actively participate in developing project, evaluating students’ progress, guiding students, communicating with students, and assessing students’ performances. This kind of active learning highly improves the student learning outcomes by providing additional motivation, professionalism, feedback from real industry partners, and strengthening team spirit among our students. The DoCS has successfully completed three (3) such projects in Fall-2003 and Fall-2004 semesters.

1. Introduction

The DoCS has been involved in the Corporate Scholar Solutions (CSS) program of the Center for Information Technology Education (CITE) since Spring-2002. CITE is an NSF-funded center that aims at improving the IT workforce pipeline in the State of Tennessee. It promotes the use of CSS Projects to strengthen partnerships among businesses and educational institutions through participation in problem-based learning experiences with real-time business problems. The CSS program is designed to partner educational institutions and their IT students with area businesses and industries to provide a "real-world, real-time" issue/problem as the context for IT learning [1].

The DoCS successfully completed two CSS projects with Saturn Corporation and Electronic Data System (EDS) as industry partners in Fall-2003 and Fall-2004 for our Computer Programming with Java and Event Driven Programming courses, respectively. Saturn is a car manufacturer that started production in 1990 and EDS is a large service company that provides services to Saturn Corporation [2,3]. The business problems that our students were asked to solve

“Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Sekmen, A. (2005, June), Integration Of Industry Partners In Computer Science Education Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--15222