Steganography and cartography: interesting assignments that reinforce machine representation, bit manipulation, and discrete structures concepts

• Published in: SIGCSE bulletin 2005-02, Vol.37 (1), p.277-281
• Main Authors: Stevenson, Daniel E., Wick, Michael R., Ratering, Steven J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0097-8418
• DOI: 10.1145/1047124.1047443

Today's generation of students crave assignments that are relevant to their world, both in terms of graphical interfaces and, more importantly, the application area. To be fully engaged they must find the application of importance. However, we have found that many assignments in computer science attempt to engage the students by moving further and further away from the underlying machine representations. This causes a disconnect between the applications our students write and the material we present on machine representations and architecture. We present examples of assignments based from the fields of Steganography and Cartography that we have found to be valuable in helping to reinforce the importance of machine representations with today's students. We found that the students were excited and intrigued to see how their discipline could play a vital role in the war on terrorism and how what they were learning in their CS 1 course was directly relevant to what they heard on the nightly news and experience on a daily basis via the Internet.