“A Service-Oriented Approach to Teaching CS/IS1” Billy Lim, Bryan Hosack, Paul Vogt School of Information Technology Ill

1. “A Service-Oriented Approach to Teaching CS/IS1” Billy Lim, Bryan Hosack, Paul Vogt School of Information Technology Illinois State University

2. Outline • Project Overview (10 mins) • Courseware Showcase (10 mins) • Hands-On Experiments with Exercises (20 mins) • Experience Report (10 mins) • Group Discussions (20 mins) • Feedback (10 mins)

3. Project Overview • Began with: • "On Integrating Web Services from the Ground Up into CS1/CS2," ACM SIGCSE 2005, St. Louis, MO, Feb., 2005. • Now supported by: • NSF-DUE-CCLI-0837056, "Integrating Service-Oriented Paradigm into Introductory Information Technology Curricula," 2009 – 2011.

4. Special Session Objectives 1. Disseminate the use of service-oriented approach to teaching CS1/IS1 2. Explore educational innovations for indoctrinating students the state-of-the-art software development practices using SOA 3. Build a learning/research community of service-orientation-in-CS1/IS1 enthusiasts.

5. Basic Ideas • SOA/Web services have gained popularity in many industries and in upper division/graduate CS/IS curricula • Why not introduce service-orientation earlier in the curriculum? • Service-orientation can make a course more interesting • Service-orientation can better prepare students for upper division classes and for the industry upon graduation • Service-orientation can introduce sound principles of software engineering earlier in the curriculum

6. Courseware Showcase • Main project site: • http://www.itk.ilstu.edu/ws4intro • The site contains info on: • PowerPoint slides • Lab exercises • Programming assignments • Tutorials • List of Web services used • Special Session CD contains the above too

7. Hands-On Experiments with Exercises • IDE: • NetBeans 6.8 with Java Web and EE • If installed with Featureson Demand, need workarounds • Tools > Plugins > Installed >Java Web and EE, click Activate. • Close and reopen projects

8. Exercise 1 • Suppose that you work for a company that wishes to provide an online forum for its users to comment on products or topics. You are asked to filter out profanities before comments are posted. • WSDL for the profanity filtering service can be found at: • http://ws.cdyne.com/ProfanityWS/Profanity.asmx?wsdl

9. Exercise 1 • Sample Interactions (2 separate runs): Enter comment: You smoked what? Weed? Dumb! The filtered comment is: You smoked what? [explicit]? Dumb! Your statement has 1 profane word(s) Enter comment: The weather is crappy today The filtered comment is: The weather is [Explicit] today Your statement has 1 profane word(s)

10. Exercise 2 • Suppose that you wish to provide a TheatersMoviesFindersuch that upon receiving a zipcode and a radius from the user, you list all the theaters and the movies playing in each of the theaters in the zipcode, within the radius given. • WSDL for the Web service can be found at: • http://www.ignyte.com/webservices/ignyte.whatsshowing.webservice/moviefunctions.asmx?wsdl

11. Exercise 2 • Sample Interactions: Enter the zipcode: 61704 Enter the radius: 10 The theaters and movies playing in the area are: Theater #1 = Carmike Parkway 8    movie #1 = Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs    movie #2 = Couples Retreat    movie #3 = Fame   movie #4 = InglouriousBasterds   movie #5 = My One and Only   movie #6 = Surrogates   movie #7 = Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself   movie #8 = ZombielandTheater #2 = Carmike University 8   movie #1 = G-Force   movie #2 = G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobraetc.

12. Experience Report • Outcome 1: Students will provide a better evaluation of the IT1 course by 10% as compared to traditional IT1 course evaluations. Students will also indicate a positive perception of the SOA/Web services learning experience. • Limited data…partial support

13. Experience Report (cont’d) • Outcome 2: Student course grade performance will increase in the IT1 course by 10% as compared to traditional IT1 course performance. • Statistically significant improvement in final exam performance and course grade • Grading bias and other concerns • Outcome 3: Employers of computer science and information technology students will indicate a positive response to an SOA/Web services centered curriculum.

14. Experience Report (cont’d) • Continued interest in students after the completion of the class • Initial frustration translates to positive response when creating “real-world”-like applications • Engaging experience for faculty

15. Experience Report (cont’d) • “Do I have to code this? Isn’t there a Web service to do that?” • A student’s comment on the requirement to “validate … the state’s 2-letter abbreviation (must be one of the 50 state abbreviations).” • “But that’s just calling the Web service to get a word from the dictionary, right?” • A student’s remark on needing to handle the part of the assignment that requires them to hit a Web service to randomly generate a word (after he has already completed the part where he provides his own word) in the Hangman program.

16. Group Discussion Topics • Phase II objectives? • Viability of the current curriculum in other academic institutions? • What would you like to hear from the industry perspective?

17. Feedback Please tell us what you think!