Students often view courses in isolation and seldom get the 'big picture" of the overall focus of the curriculum. This problem is compounded when the concepts and theory is not reinforced by concrete laboratory experiences throughout the curriculum. Previously funded projects at the University of South Alabama have successfully addressed these problems at the freshmen level. It is recognized that these advantages gained, by the prior funding, are not fully capitalized upon if the efforts are not continued in subsequent courses. The activities needed to extend this prior successful funding effort includes a hands-on laboratory experience at the upper levels of the curriculum. The role of this lab will be two fold: (1) provide a project environment where juniors and seniors can reinforce course concepts and (2) provide projects which will then be integrated back into sophomore and freshmen courses to serve as concrete examples of future expectations of the students. This concrete laboratory experience at multiple levels of the curriculum will provide a unique opportunity to overcome the curriculum problems identified above. At the sophomore level, software engineering students will use these projects as a practical test bed to consider the concepts of that course. The completed projects will then be integrated into the existing laboratory environment of the freshmen sequence. This final integration will provide an alternative breadth view of programming and problem solving not currently present in the sequence. By the integration of these projects into the lower levels courses, students will be shown the expectations of later courses. It is also anticipated that this inter-class synergy would serve to motivate and excite CS students. This multi-level concrete laboratory experience provides an overall vision of the CS discipline. The projects developed and the subsequent process of integration into the lower level courses would serve as a model of how to overcome the course isolation problem.
