COURSE / PROGRAM

•  HIST 4281: Historical Representation in Video Games

ABSTRACT

HISTORY 4281: HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION IN VIDEO GAMES will be an entirely new blended course open to all S&T students who have taken any of the entry-level survey courses. It taps into the widespread popularity of historically-themed video games as a way to teach students major concepts in historiography (i.e. the study of history-writing, its methods, and its practitioners), the philosophy of history, and media studies. Its goal is to encourage students to think more critically about how the media they consume makes statements, both explicit and implicit, about the nature of humanity’s past. It will give students the opportunity to develop Humanities skills (creating, presenting on, and writing about digital media) using STEM tools in a flexible course format.

COURSE / PROGRAM

• ENG 1222: American Literature Since the Civil War

ABSTRACT

English 1222 is a staple course for the Department of English and Technical Communication. It serves as a commonly-chosen humanities elective for many students across the university. The main purpose of the course is to introduce students to great works of American literature from the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In addition, this course helps students to become more careful and skillful readers of literary texts in general.

COURSE / PROGRAM

•  PHIL 1115: Introduction to Logic

ABSTRACT

This project is the redesign and redevelopment of the online asynchronous section of Philosophy 1115, Introduction to Logic. In this course students acquire the basic skills used in the proper evaluation of argumentation or reasoning; that is, the students learn critical thinking. To this end, the students learn logical terminology and constantly work on developing the skill of identifying arguments and writing them out as clearly, strongly, and charitably as possible within context and reason. They learn and practice the proper methods of evaluating arguments, which include Aristotle's categorical logic and modern symbolic logic. The fifteen weeks of the course are divided into three five-week sections. Each section focuses on a particular area of logic, and each section is structured the same. In each of the three sections, there are reading assignments from a textbook and detailed notes posted in Canvas that explicate the reading as well as the proper way to complete the homework problems. Moreover, there are four written assignments (one due each of the first four weeks) and one exam (during the fifth week) for each section. Thus, for the current iteration of the course, students complete twelve written assignments and three exams. 

COURSE / PROGRAM

•  CS 4090 & 4091: CS Software Engineering Capstone Design
  

ABSTRACT

This project aims to aggregate software engineering learning outcomes and structure them into the newly approved Computer Science (CS) Software Engineering Capstone sequence (CS 4090 & CS 4091). The CS undergraduate curriculum has historically contained a required course in software engineering fundamentals (CS 3100), along with a project-focused system-design course (CS 4096—and the optional Software Systems Development II (CS 4097)). It is anticipated that a redesign can align all related course content, provide a richer student experience, and better satisfy the desires of industry partners as well as accreditation bodies.

COURSE / PROGRAM

•  Comp Eng 2210: Introduction to Digital Logic
  

ABSTRACT

CpE 2210 is the introductory course into Computer Engineering. All CpE students along with Electrical Engineering and Computer Science students are required to pass the course with a ‘C’ or better. The course examines the core components from which digital systems are designed, constructed, and analyzed. Topics include binary numbers, truth tables, Boolean algebra, Karnaugh maps, combinational logic, digital components, CMOS, programmable logic devices, and sequential circuits. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing, with CpE 2211 lab a co-requisite for Computer and Electrical Engineering majors. The lab is not part of this proposal. CpE 2210 is a prerequisite for every Computer Engineering course.

There is currently no approved on-line material available for Cpe2210. As a result, the course is not offered as either synchronous or asynchronous, nor is it offered as a blended course. All transfer students are required to take the course since it is not offered by any of Missouri S&T’s feeder schools. As a result, transfer students are often at a disadvantage since they will be a semester behind. It is particularly an issue for Computer Engineering students since the sequence of the next three CpE courses starts with CpE 2210, thus reducing the number of CpE Electives the student will be qualified to take without staying extra semesters.

The course redesign will be offered as a series of video lectures. These lectures can be used in a synchronous or asynchronous classroom. They also serve as the basis for a blended classroom, freeing the blended professor to focus on the in-class assignments. With the planned addition of on-line homework, quizzes and exams, the material can be used for a full-fledged online course. An online article from Rasmussen College [1] indicates that online courses produce comparable, and in many cases, better student results. This is primarily due to the online culture and students budgeting their time differently. An online option gives students the opportunity to learn at the pace that suits them, at the time that suits them. Often half the battle is getting the students to be at class, the online option brings the classroom to them.