CS 50 TFs Given Free Tablet PCs
The computers—which the TFs will be allowed to keep for personal use once the course is over—are one of several corporate donations engineered by the course’s instructor, David J. Malan ’99.
Malan said the computers will help the TFs with grading, which he said has always been one of the most time-consuming aspects of their job.
“My hopes were to do whatever we could to optimize that process so TFs could focus their time more on the teaching aspect rather than the minutia of adding or subtracting points,” Malan said. “Tablet PCs struck us as a wonderful opportunity technologically to chip away at what is otherwise a fairly laborious process.”
Malan said he reached out to representatives from Microsoft last spring.
According to Shafeen Charania, the director of marketing in Microsoft’s education product group, Microsoft agreed to donate a tablet PC to each of the course’s TFs “to facilitate better teaching outcomes and help students effectively visualize the concepts of computer science.”
Although the 30 tablet computers—Dell Latitude XT models, valued at $2,351 each on Dell’s Web site—only arrived this past week, the intial response has been positive.
“Our students submit PDFs of code and we can write comments on it,” said Peter H. Lifland ’10, one of the almost 30 TFs for the course. “It makes the grading process a lot faster.”
“It’s like when an English professor highlights or marks stuff,” said Kenneth A. Parreno ’11, another TF. “It helps us give a lot of feedback in a faster, more efficient way.”
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[...] CS 50 TFs Given Free Tablet PCs [...]