Dr. Elizabeth R Rasnick

Parents, business leaders, and politicians agree that computer science (CS) education is a critical and necessary component of
U.S. high school curriculum. Today however, key indicators, such as course offerings and participation in CS-related advanced
placement exams, point to a significant lack of K-12 CS curriculum. Statesboro High School in Bulloch County, Georgia does
not currently offer any formal CS-related course, making it a prime example of this gap. Faculty from both the high school and Georgia Southern University’s Department of Information Technology decided to work together to 1) demonstrate the need for a CS curriculum, 2) demonstrate the desire for CS-related courses, and 3) begin laying the foundation for a structured CS program conforming to Georgia state policy and guidelines.

The need for a computer science curriculum is evidenced by the depth and breadth of private industry and government programs calling for and supporting CS programs. The desire for CS courses is clearly evidenced by multiple parental surveys and job opportunities, as well as the overwhelming positive student engagement in an on-site tech fair and informal survey regarding the start of a new after-school tech club. The foundation for building a computer science program at Statesboro High School began with the creation of an after-school tech club – named Code Blue – to establish potential enrollment and test various topics. Faculty and researchers learned multiple lessons concerning the technical details, execution plans, instructional techniques, and politics for introducing new curriculum.

Information blackouts, defined as sudden and short-duration failures of the information flow in a supply chain, amplify the bullwhip effect in supply chains. We develop a discrete-event simulation of a multi-echelon supply chain, utilizing Rockwell Automation's Arena software tool, to investigate this phenomenon. We investigate inventory order history blackouts of three different durations (1, 2, and 3 time periods). Based on the increased bullwhip effect observed as the result of an information blackout, managers may decide to "wait out" the amplification or to use an estimate to replace the missing inventory order history by utilizing the last known value. The latter choice employs the common manager's heuristic of trusting the recent past to be the best predictor of the future. Our results provide supporting evidence for such managerial decisions.

Internet document sharing systems such as Flickr store billions of user-contributed images. Many collections on the Web contain large numbers of multimedia objects such as images. While such systems are designed to encourage user contributions and sharing, they are not well-organized collections on any given subject and are not easy to browse for specific subject matters. We have built a system that systematically organizes a large multimedia collection into an evolving faceted classification. This paper discusses the evaluation of such a system through a number of usage studies in a university setting.