“A Service-Oriented Approach to Teaching CS/IS1”

Billy Lim, Bryan Hosack, Paul VogtSchool of Information Technology

Illinois State University

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Outline

• Project Overview (10 mins)• Courseware Showcase (10 mins)• Hands-On Experiments with Exercises (20 mins)• Experience Report (10 mins)• Group Discussions (20 mins)• Feedback (10 mins)

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Project Overview

• Began with: – "On Integrating Web Services from the Ground Up into

CS1/CS2," ACM SIGCSE 2005, St. Louis, MO, Feb., 2005. • Now supported by:

– NSF-DUE-CCLI-0837056, "Integrating Service-Oriented Paradigm into Introductory Information Technology Curricula," 2009 – 2011.

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Special Session Objectives

1. Disseminate the use of service-oriented approach to teaching CS1/IS1

2. Explore educational innovations for indoctrinating students the state-of-the-art software development practices using SOA

3. Build a learning/research community of service-orientation-in-CS1/IS1 enthusiasts.

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Basic Ideas

• SOA/Web services have gained popularity in many industries and in upper division/graduate CS/IS curricula

• Why not introduce service-orientation earlier in the curriculum?– Service-orientation can make a course more interesting– Service-orientation can better prepare students for upper

division classes and for the industry upon graduation– Service-orientation can introduce sound principles of

software engineering earlier in the curriculum

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Courseware Showcase

• Main project site:– http://www.itk.ilstu.edu/ws4intro

• The site contains info on:– PowerPoint slides– Lab exercises– Programming assignments– Tutorials– List of Web services used

• Special Session CD contains the above too

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Hands-On Experiments with Exercises

• IDE: – NetBeans 6.8 with Java Web and EE– If installed with Features

on Demand, need workarounds

• Tools > Plugins > Installed >Java Web and EE, click Activate.

• Close and reopen projects

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Exercise 1

• Suppose that you work for a company that wishes to provide an online forum for its users to comment on products or topics. You are asked to filter out profanities before comments are posted.

• WSDL for the profanity filtering service can be found at:– http://ws.cdyne.com/ProfanityWS/Profanity.asmx?wsdl

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Exercise 1

• Sample Interactions (2 separate runs):Enter comment: You smoked what? Weed? Dumb!The filtered comment is:You smoked what? [explicit]? Dumb!Your statement has 1 profane word(s)

Enter comment: The weather is crappy todayThe filtered comment is:The weather is [Explicit] todayYour statement has 1 profane word(s)

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Exercise 2

• Suppose that you wish to provide a TheatersMoviesFinder such that upon receiving a zipcode and a radius from the user, you list all the theaters and the movies playing in each of the theaters in the zipcode, within the radius given.

• WSDL for the Web service can be found at:– http://www.ignyte.com/webservices/ignyte.whatsshowing.webse

rvice/moviefunctions.asmx?wsdl

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Exercise 2

• Sample Interactions:Enter the zipcode: 61704Enter the radius: 10

The theaters and movies playing in the area are:

Theater #1 = Carmike Parkway 8 movie #1 = Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs movie #2 = Couples Retreat movie #3 = Fame movie #4 = Inglourious Basterds movie #5 = My One and Only movie #6 = Surrogates movie #7 = Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself movie #8 = ZombielandTheater #2 = Carmike University 8 movie #1 = G-Force movie #2 = G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobraetc.

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Experience Report

• Outcome 1: Students will provide a better evaluation of the IT1 course by 10% as compared to traditional IT1 course evaluations. Students will also indicate a positive perception of the SOA/Web services learning experience. – Limited data…partial support

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Experience Report (cont’d)

• Outcome 2: Student course grade performance will increase in the IT1 course by 10% as compared to traditional IT1 course performance.

– Statistically significant improvement in final exam performance and course grade

– Grading bias and other concerns

• Outcome 3: Employers of computer science and information technology students will indicate a positive response to an SOA/Web services centered curriculum.

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Experience Report (cont’d)

• Continued interest in students after the completion of the class

• Initial frustration translates to positive response when creating “real-world”-like applications

• Engaging experience for faculty

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Experience Report (cont’d)

• “Do I have to code this? Isn’t there a Web service to do that?”– A student’s comment on the requirement to “validate … the

state’s 2-letter abbreviation (must be one of the 50 state abbreviations).”

• “But that’s just calling the Web service to get a word from the dictionary, right?”– A student’s remark on needing to handle the part of the

assignment that requires them to hit a Web service to randomly generate a word (after he has already completed the part where he provides his own word) in the Hangman program.

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Group Discussion Topics

• Phase II objectives?

• Viability of the current curriculum in other academic institutions?

• What would you like to hear from the industry perspective?

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Please tell us what you think!

Feedback