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This paper describes a proof of concept for introducing iPods and iPodLinux into a one-semester introductory undergraduate operating systems course. iPodLinux is a version of the Linux operating system modified to run on iPods. We added a project to our course in which the students modified the iPodLinux kernel, and we supplemented lectures by discussing specifics of the Linux implementation as they relate to general operating systems concepts. We feel the course was much improved by these additions, with no substantive omission of regular material. Student response was very enthusiastic, and we feel the new material enhanced their course experience by providing a component that was empowering and helped to further improve their knowledge and skills.

This paper describes our implementation and experience of incorporating computer science concepts into a team-taught, first-year interdisciplinary course for prospective science majors at the University of Richmond. The course integrates essential concepts from each of five STEM disciplines: biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics. Including computer science in this course faces three primary challenges: few of the students have any CS background; the time devoted to CS instruction is reduced compared to a traditional introductory CS course; and the spirit of the course requires the CS material to be highly integrated with the other disciplines. Here we discuss our experience from three-plus years of offering the course and its impact on the major/minor pool of students in our own discipline.

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The work described in this paper is part of an NSF funded project to develop tutorial materials for introductory computer science courses. We had several general goals for these materials that had an impact on their design and implementation:• they should be delivered on-line;• they should be highly interactive;• they should be useful on a wide variety of hardware/software platforms; and• it should be easy to extend the content to different courses or contexts.In trying to meet these goals we designed and implemented a package of Java classes that provided a framework for creating our set of tutorials, yet was general enough to be used in other contexts such as interactive laboratories. This paper describes the framework and the design decisions that governed the implementation. Information about obtaining the package is included in section 7.