Academia

On Friday Feb. 19th, students in Bob Waters’ Objects and Design class were given the chance to attend a guest lecture by Greg Wilson, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. While guest lectures are by no means an uncommon occurrence in the College of Computing, Wilson’s talk raised a question applicable to a larger-than-normal percentage of College of Computing students: if we’re computer scientists, where’s all the science?

My family calls them "momilies and dadages," * those short, sometimes witty, usually self-evident life lessons that moms and dads and other elders pass along to the younger generation ... which promptly ignores them.

One of the things I love about Georgia Tech is how a random walk around campus can suddenly morph into taking part in some kind of interesting event.  Last spring, for example, I was walking near the Klaus building when I ventured into an information session that eventually led to me getting a research position at the Graphics Visualization and Usability center.  On September 11th, it happened again.

It's common knowledge that computer science is a versatile field. With applications in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math, and dozens of others, it seems like computing has a foot in the door pretty much everywhere you turn. But what about education? For years, computing applications for education was been a young and slow-growing field. Recently, though, the field has really begun to blossom, and some amazing research in Educational Technology and Computing for Education is being conducted at Tech as we speak.