NSF Awards Adelphi Professor Nearly $500,000

Associate Professor Stephen Bloch

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $499,688 in grant funding over the next four years to Adelphi University Associate Professor Stephen Bloch, who was named principal investigator for "Redesigning Introductory Computing: The Design Discipline.." Along with colleagues at Northeastern University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, University of Utah, and California Polytechnic State University/San Luis Obispo, Dr. Bloch will host week-long summer workshops for college faculty on "TeachScheme, ReachJava!," a breakthrough approach to teaching introductory computer programming that emphasizes broad problem-solving skills. The investigators will also measure what effect the technique had on student learning in participants' classrooms. The goal is to train more than 150 faculty from a variety of colleges and universities.

"Our curriculum starts students with a consistent and simple language," said Adelphi University Associate Professor Dr. Bloch. "Students develop good programming habits and a solid understanding of concepts like 'variable', 'data type', and 'function' and then learn to apply the same skills and concepts in other, more complex languages."

This is Dr. Bloch's second largest NSF grant. The first grant for $1.6 million, from 2001-2005, helped to train primarily high school teachers in the innovative teaching technique, originally developed by Matthias Felleisen.

Dr. Bloch, who began teaching mathematics and computer science at Adelphi in 1994, is a member of numerous professional societies, including Association for Computing Machinery, Computing Research Association, Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), American Mathematical Society, and Association for Symbolic Logic. He has authored and co-authored numerous articles. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at San Diego and B.S. in math and computer science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech).

To learn more about the project and scheduled workshops, visit http://teach-scheme.org. For more information about Adelphi's department of mathematics and computer science, visit http://adelphi.edu/cs.