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Increasing Student Retention in Computer Science [11.06.06]
- Peter Stephenson, Stephen Lecrenski and Brent Peckham
 Introduction
Since 2004, the University of Rhode Island and The IMEDIA Academy have been running a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site sponsored by the National Science Foundation to encourage student retention in computer science in graduate programs and scientific careers. During the program, the students work on a computer graphics research project fulltime over summer and possibly parttime over the fall semester. They also have the possibility to spend a month pursuing their research at the Institute for Computer Graphics or the Center for Graphic Data Processing in Darmstadt, Germany. The students take their projects through the full research cycle, including writing a proposal, reviewing the proposals of their peers, conducting the research, implementing a result, giving a presentation and writing a technical paper, which have appeared in international conferences and journals.
One current research direction that we are pursuing in the program is the use of serious games in education and entertainment. Serious gaming is a burgeoning industry with several well known titles, the most famous and infamous being America's Army with over 7.5 million registered players as of October 2006. America's Army was developed by the U.S. government as a public relations and recruitment tool but they freely admit that they cannot quantifiably state how well it serves these purposes. For what training or teaching purposes are serious games useful? Is realism critical? Can tasks be simplified and maintain their training impact? Do serious games improve on or augment simulated and classroom training? From a research perspective, many of these questions are open.
In these two projects we developed two small yet serious games with the aim to evaluate and compare their educational impacts. The first takes players into the unreachable environment 4000 metres below sea level. The second, allows people to explore the world though the eyes of someone with a visual impairment. Both of these games puts the player in a situation that they could otherwise not be. But as gamers know, that is the beauty and attraction of virtual environments.
Dr. Peter Stephenson is Technology Consultant in digital media, serious games, online learning systems, visualization and volume rendering. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Rhode Island (URI) where he co-manages an NSF REU Site, supervises postgraduate research, and teaches computer graphics. Peter holds a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics and Computer Science with Honors in Computer Science, and a PhD in Computer Science from James Cook University in Australia. He received postgraduate certification in Science Communication at the Australian National University.
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