The results of three computer science research projects, conducted by Hope College faculty and students from Hope and other colleges, will appear in national computer science publications.
The Winter, 1997, issue of "Crossroads," a student
magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery,
contains an article reporting on the results of research
carried out during the summer of 1997 by three undergraduate
students under the direction of Mike Jipping, associate
professor of computer science at Hope. The three students
are Anita Van Engen Bateman, a Hope senior from Glendora,
Calif.; Michael Bradshaw, a junior at Centre College in
Danville, Ky.; and Nathan Oostendorp, a Hope junior from
Bateman, Bradshaw and Oostendorp wrote an article
titled "Extending Java to support shared resource protection
and deadlock detection in threads programming." The paper
describes their research with Jipping to detect blocking
conditions that can occur during the execution of computer
programs running on parallel processors.
Herb Dershem, professor of computer science, along
with James Vanderhyde, a Hope junior from Comstock Park, has
written a paper that will appear in the February, 1998,
issue of the "SIGCSE Bulletin" of the Association for
Computing Machinery. The paper, "Java class visualization
for teaching object-oriented concepts," describes research
the two conducted to generate animations that permit users
to observe and manipulate objects graphically.
The work is intended to assist in the
understanding, designing and testing of object-oriented
systems. A special feature of the work is that users may
interact with it over the World Wide Web.
Dershem also collaborated with Peter Brummund, a
junior at Taylor University in Upland, Ind., in the writing
of the paper "Tools for web-based sorting animation." The
paper, which will also appear in the February, 1998, issue
of the "SIGCSE Bulletin," describes a set of tools developed
by the two to enable animated views of sorting algorithms to
appear over the World Wide Web, assisting students in
learning the mechanics of the various algorithms.
The work upgrades the work of previous researchers
by providing general tools that include several new
features, including a new approach to viewing certain ways
programs work internally, called recursion. Brummund also
compiled a directory of algorithm animations developed by
authors all over the world and available over the World Wide
Web. The directory is available to educators all over the
world and already been used extensively, according to
All of the researchers will be attending the 29th
SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in
Atlanta, Ga., on Thursday-Friday, Feb. 26-27. Bateman,
Bradshaw and Oostendorp will be presenting their work as a
part of the Student Poster Competition, competing with
undergraduate researchers from 17 other institutions.
Dershem, along with students Vanderhyde and Brummund, will
be giving two 30-minute presentations of both of their
projects at the same conference.
All of the research was conducted on the Hope
campus during the summer of 1997 with the support of a grant
from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program of
the National Science Foundation. Hope is one of only 19
institutions that host such a program, and Hope has done so
for each of the past six summers. During the summer of 1997
program, four faculty and eight students worked on five
different research projects.