Many computer science programs suffer from low student retention rates. At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, academic performance and retention rates among first-year computer science students are among the lowest on campus.In order to remedy this, we have developed a new CS0 course featuring different "tracks" that students can choose from (e.g. robotics, gaming, music, mobile apps). This allows students to learn the basics of programming, teamwork, and college-level study in a domain that is of personal interest. In addition, the course relies on classic Project-based Learning (PBL) approaches as well as a focus on both academic and non-academic factors shown to increase student retention.Initial assessment demonstrates positive results in the form of increased academic performance in post CS0 courses and student retention.

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Applications that are distributed, fault tolerant, or perform dynamic load balancing rely on redirection techniques, such as network address translation (NAT), DNS request routing, or middleware to han dle Internet scale loads. In this paper, we describe a new connection redirection mechanism that allows applications to change end-points of communication channels. The mechanism supports redirections across LANs and WANs and is application-independent. Further, it does not introduce any central bottlenecks. We have implemented the redirection mechanism using a novel end-point control session layer. The perfor mance results show that the overhead of the mechanism is minimal. Fur ther, Internet applications built using this mechanism scale better than those built using HTTP redirection.

He received his B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley, his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Clemson University, and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis. His interests are in systems research, with an emphasis on: Distributed Systems, Networking, Interprocess Communications, Operating Systems and Parallel Architectures. Current efforts are in the identification and elimination of I/O bottlenecks in distributed systems.

User perceived quality is the most important aspect of Internet applications. After a single negative experience, users tend to switch to one of the other myriad of alternatives available to them on the Internet. Two key components of Internet application quality are scalability and reliability. In this paper, we present the first general-purpose mechanism capable of maintaining reliability in the face of process, machine, and catastrophic failures. We define catastrophic failures as events that cause entire clusters of servers to become unavailable such as network partitioning, router failures, natural disasters, or even terrorist attacks. Our mechanism utilizes client-side tunneling, clientside redirection, and implicit redirection triggers to deliver reliable communication channels. We capitalize on previous work, Redirectable Sockets (RedSocks), that focuses on Internet application scalability. RedSocks are communication channels enhanced with a novel session layer aimed at modernizing network communication. We modify RedSocks to create the first fault tolerant socket solution that can handle all server-side failures. Our mechanism is compatible with NATs and Firewalls, scalable, application independent, and backwards compatible.