Computer Science Classes I Would Like To See Offered

My friend Warren recently expressed a very “scorched earth” opinion of the standard Computer Science curriculum. He suggested that given the available of free CS courses (OpenCourseWare and the like) and experts at your fingertips (Blogs and Stackoverflow); wheres the value of a formal CS degree?  That lead me to think …. What are some classes that would be very interesting to take: [Even as an alumni of 2 CS programs, I would be interested]

• Software Development Tools: A lot of classes mention tools, but not how to actually use and extend them. [Build systems, version control systems, formatters, emulators/virtualization]

• Debugging: The goal of this class is to teach basic skills and then go through labs of finding/fixing bugs. Later, to write unit tests to verify the bugs.

• Testing software: This would be a hands-on class to teach students how to write unit tests, implement mocks, test black box software, and write up reports on testing procedures. This would also the involve testing of embedded hardware and software, black box systems, functional languages, network services, concurrent software, and even components that lack a stable test environment.

• Computer Vision: It’s just interesting, and visual, often you don’t hit this class until graduate school.

• How to design an API/Surveying APIs: Let’s get rid of bad APIs. This would also be responsible for demonstrating the differences [good and bad] of available APIs.

• Open Source: Not really a history of open source. But this is to take an open source project, and extend it. The goal of this project is to get students involved with working with one project, and demonstrating improvement to the project.

• Marketing: How to market your work, or someone else’s software. This isn’t designed to replace developers with marketers, but it just helps the developer understand how their work is sold.

• Automation: How to automate manual tasks with software. This could be with build scripts, batch scripts, testing automation software, or even simple system scheduling.

• From hardware to software: The goal of this class would be 2 things. To create a small embedded device, and then go all the way up the chain to a working software client. This would involve writing a device driver, interfacing with hardware ports, and using the driver. The second part of this class would involve creating a simple processor either as a circuit or a manual build. https://blog.makezine.com/2009/10/03/building-a-cpu-from-scratch/

• How Computer Science relates to [Field x, y or z]: This is more of an open ended suggestion. For example: Offer a class on Bioinformatics [It’s a class that combines biology, and computer science], combine a class on art and computer science (that’s more of visualizations though), history and CS [examine potential DSLs involved with history research], or even math and CS [shows the tools, and libraries that one can use in their application].

• How to crack software/re-engineer a binary: [Probably with the permission of the publisher] Crack a copy protection system. Many students know about software cracks, but very few actually know how to create them or how they work. The goal of this class would to familiarize the student with how software is compiled, and can be reworked after compilation. Also, this would demonstrate how to protect their application as well.

• Alternative Language Survey: Yes, this is technically a standard class. But I’d like to see one on functional languages, Groovy, BF, or even creating your own domain specific languages be taught.

• Community Service: This really isn’t as altruistic as the title may imply. This is more of a class to create a software component [as a large group] for a member of a local community. This could be a small interesting game [example I worked with a group for a class], or working with a small company or individual to improve or sofware-ize their product. Elon’s CS department did this a while back with the game deflection. even taking an existing board game [with the original creator] and making  a software version. The goal of this class is to research market need, create something usable and getting their fellow peers involved in using it. This would help communicate to the rest of the students about some of the cool things that CS can produce.

• Author selected: Get an author of a quality software related book to teach a class. Have John Skeet teach a C# class. Paul Graham teach a class on LISP. Brian Goetz to teach a class on Concurrency.

• Hands on Software Optimization class: Take an open source system, and optimize it. This class would teach formal procedures on how to optimize an existing application to perform as quickly as possible, monitor, and document the improvements.

Last of all, these classes should be fun and engaging. If you’re not actively involving the student, don’t even bother trying these suggestions.