This CISE Educational Innovation award provides funds to support the design, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of a new introductory-level course in computing which teaches the Strategic Use of Computer Systems. This strategic knowledge has been developed under a 1994 NSF Young Investigator Award to the PI. It helps users decompose tasks effectively and efficiently with respect to the powers and limitation of their computer tools and has been shown to produce significant improvements in productivity. The new course is being developed with a pilot section of students in the Computing Skills Workshop (CSW) course at CMU beginning in 1999 and is expected to then be adopted by all of the CSW sections in the next year. The project has the potential to make major impact on undergraduate education in computing at a national level.
