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REPORT ON JAVASCRIPT IN COMP 106

Universal Machine is the primary service course in the Computer Science curriculum at Wheaton, and the main emphasis of the course is to introduce students to several computing tools that showcase the potential, and limitations, of technology. The course has traditionally included multimedia authoring with a focus on the aspects that make it a fundamentally different medium from the printed page. My project this spring was to migrate from HyperCard on the Macintosh to the use of HTML and JavaScript for web documents on both Macintosh and WindowsNT platforms. The cross-platform aspects of JavaScript were especially important since the weekly labs for the class met in the new computer lab with machines running WindowsNT. By working in both environments, the students significantly improved their understanding of the the Internet and networking issues.

Report

Pedagogical Goals

One of the problems with assigning multimedia projects in an introductory course is that the bells and whistles may be present, but quite often the projects are lacking any significant content. One tremendous advantage of using JavaScript in Universal Machine is that the student projects can be made available to the world via the campus webserver, which gives the students extra incentive to focus on the content.

Another goal of using JavaScript is that it is cross-platform and the students work on both Macintoshes and WindowsNT workstations. This gave them a perspective on computer networking and the Internet that would be much more difficult to obtain by working on a single platform.

Strategy

The class met on Tuesday and Thursday in Science Center A102, which is equipped with Macintosh computers, and met in the WindowsNT lab on Wednesdays. We spent approximately eight weeks on web-related topics including HTML and running a web server, with five of those weeks focussed on JavaScript.

For the final project, the students worked in twelve teams of two or three to produce web pages for a student organization which will become part of Wheaton's permanent website. This gave the students the added incentive that their projects were evaluated not only by me for a grade, but could possibly be viewed by thousands of people from around the world.

Assessment

My only formal assessment was a supplemental evaluation that asked the students about the applications we used during the semester. I asked two questions related to web authoring and JavaScript and received the following responses:

The web authoring we did was interesting to me:

Strongly Agree: 20 Agree: 4 Disagree: Strongly Disagree:

JavaScript is a good addition to html:

Strongly Agree: 19 Agree: 4 Disagree: 1 Strongly Disagree:

Clearly, the students were interested in web authoring and JavaScript.

Overall, I was fairly pleased with the transition to JavaScript, but there are some "clunky" aspects to the language that are necessary to overcome the current limitations of the web. I believe that JavaScript is the right language for Universal Machine at the present time, but as the web matures, I anticipate that JavaScript will either significantly mature or else become obsolete.

Dissemination

This work will be included in the dissemination portion of the NSF-ILI grant Mark LeBlanc and I received to equip the WindowsNT lab. This includes making all of the Wednesday labs and Tuesday-Thursday mini-labs from the course, available as web documents, many of which involve JavaScript.

Last updated on 12/06/00;
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