Our Princeton N.J. Chapters of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society has sponsored a lot of interesting and fun meetings over the past 28 years, but last week's event was the first time our meeting turned into a group sing-along.
The reason, and the evening's speaker, was John P. Dougherty (aka “J.D.”), assistant professor of computer science at Haverford College, who lead a fun romp though his adventures in "computational singing," using fun songs that he has written to illustrate fundamental concepts in computation.
Beyond his technical studies in dependable parallel scientific computing and data intensive scalable computing, Dougherty has passionate interests in computer science education, including introductory courses for undergraduates and outreach to K-12 students.
His idea of outreach for computer science is finding connections between information technology and society that can make computing more accessible to a broad audience, to help people appreciate "computational thinking."
Dougherty' Computational Singing site has lyrics and some recordings of his songs, including the whirlwind The Tour of The World of Computing (to the tune of The End of the World by R.E.M.), and illustrations of C.S. concepts including loop invariants, infinite loops, and, of course, spam.
Also see his two videos accepted for the ACM SIGCSE 2009 Video Exhibition (Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education):
- Input and Output (to the tune of My Sweet Lord and He's So Fine, play on YouTube)
- Recursion Song (play on YouTube -- if you dare)