A classroom is equipped with workstations for twenty students and one instructor thereby making possible three changes in the computer science curriculum. First, the courses for the computer science major, particularly the first two courses, are taught in a more interactive manner. During two hour laboratory periods, students work on structured assignments under the supervision of the instructor. Second, the project provides for a standard operating system, Unix, and a powerful and standard computing environment, X Windows, that are used across the curriculum. UNIX is a standard in the academic world and previously students had only limited access to it. Third, the laboratory provides a central place where computer science majors work on individual and joint software projects while having access to considerable computing power and system documentation. Equipment acquired for this project includes powerful desktop microcomputers supporting UNIX (Sun Microsystems SPARCstation I) and "smart" terminals having a full implementation of the X Window standard (Visual Technologies X19). The twenty-one stations are networked to take advantage of a central mass storage device and a shared printer, which are also available to any other terminal on campus through the college computing network. The award is being matched with a greater amount (102%) by the principal investigator's institution.
