UC-WISE project history

The UC-WISE project grew out of education-oriented work under the CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society) umbrella. In June 2001, a group of faculty, technical staff, graduate and undergraduate students met in a two-day retreat to brainstorm design and functionality issues. The group included educational researchers, computer science instructors, and technology specialists. From that meeting emerged a system plan that leveraged the strengths of information technology and current research in education, emphasizing project-based inquiry and hands-on programming experience over lecture, employing a variety of collaborative activities, and enabling instructors to interact with students in more of a tutorial style.

In the subsequent year, supported by the CITRIS project, a small leadership team and a group of undergraduate student programmers, mostly volunteers working for course credit, designed and implemented a working system. The design included four major software components: a data base of annotated learning objects; the Course Builder, through which objects are entered into the data base; the Student Portal, which serves as a conventional learning management system; and the Curriculum Customizer, which enables remote instructors to adopt and adapt UC-WISE activities for their own courses. Simultaneously, a few experienced teachers assembled a curriculum for CS 3. The Course Builder, the Student Portal, and the curriculum were all ready for a pilot test of the lab-based CS 3 in summer 2002. This course was a big success (our experience is described here).

Subsequent milestones included the following:

• (fall 2002) simultaneous running of a special lab section of CS 3 with a version of CS 3 taught at Merced Community College, both in UC-WISE format
• (spring 2003) conversion of CS 3 to the UC-WISE format CS 3L
• (spring 2004) substantial revision of the CS 3L curriculum to incorporate WebScheme activities (a tool for scripted assessment)
• (fall 2004) pilot versions of the UC-WISE format CS 4 and CS 61BL
• (spring 2005) awarded NSF support (DUE-0443121) to create UC-WISE curricula for Java-based introductory and data structures courses
• (fall 2005) second offering of CS 61BL; CSE 20 and CSE 30 run in UC-WISE format at U.C. Merced
• (spring 2006) second offering of CS 4; CSE 21 run in UC-WISE format at U.C. Merced