CIS 410: Web Application Development

2002–04, DeVry Institute of Technology

Overview

Since 2002, I have taught computer-programming and systems-analysis courses at the DeVry Institute of Technology in Long Island City, New York. "Computer Information Systems" is DeVry's computer-programming degree program, culminating in the Bachelors of Professional Studies degree.

CIS 410, Web Application Development, ties together many elements from previous courses: computer programming, systems analysis, and relational database design. I introduce the students to n-tier development, focusing on the ways it is similar to and different from traditional compiled-software programming. Throughout the semester, we build a single product — this semester, it's an on-line store — introducing gradually more-complicated features and concepts as the semester progresses. The semester ends with a final project which encapsulates the student's understanding of the material.

The students come from very diverse educational and technical backgrounds. For many, English is not their first language. Many students are the first people in their families to attend college or engage in a scientific pursuit.

Although I have had no formal training as a teacher, I enjoy teaching, and have taught and mentored since I was in early high school. DeVry is my first classroom teaching experience.

Methodology

Each day, the students and I write a program together: I type it on the overhead screen, we all discuss it, the students make it work on their machines, and then the students work on a slightly-more-complicated, comprehensive lab exercise. I give comprehensive quizzes almost every day.

I model the class on my experience working on small teams in the corporate workplace. In those experiences, everyone on a project contributed as much as s/he could, and was rewarded for his or her participation—you contribute, you try, you learn, you get better, and the team considers you more valuable. The opposite was also true: people who didn't contribute were very obvious to the rest of the team, because someone else had to do that person's work.

As such, I strongly encourage students to participate: to ask questions, to contribute comments and answers. I grade them, daily, on their contributions — how much they participated, or, conversely, how much they distracted other students. At the same time, I try to fairly gauge their understanding of the material, and give them credit for the portion of the material they do understand—just as I felt the corporate workplace supported me. For example, on multiple-choice questions, students may edit my answers if they believe they have a better answer.

Tutorials

In addition to lesson plans, quizzes, and labs, I provide handouts describing specific topics. For example:

• Review: Dynamic Web Sites. A compilation of most of my handouts for the course, providing an overview of Web application development: data-driven web sites. Originally compiled for a 1-day summary of the course.
   
• Writing SQL from within ASP. In my experience writing n-tier applications, it is frequently necessary to write a computer program which talks to another computer system. This means that you have to teach your program how to speak some other program's language. This tutorial gives a specific example of that, by walking the student through the evolution of such a piece of code. Further details are provided in the Review document above.

And the students said…

Please see excerpts of the anonymous comments I have received from students. This section includes samples of both their handwritten comments and the results of DeVry's teacher-evaluation survey.