Experiences with Research Processes in an Undergraduate Theory of Computing Course

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating research-like activities into an undergraduate Theory of Computing course through a mock conference assignment, aiming to enhance students' technical reading, writing, and research skills.

Contribution

It presents a novel course design that simulates a research environment, including paper writing and peer review, and shares insights from its implementation.

Findings

Students improved technical reading and writing skills.

The mock conference increased engagement with research processes.

Reflections suggest potential for broader application in CS education.

Abstract

Theory of computing (ToC) courses are a staple in many undergraduate CS curricula as they lay the foundation of why CS is important to students. Although not a stated goal, an inevitable outcome of the course is enhancing the students' technical reading and writing abilities as it often contains formal reasoning and proof writing. Separately, many undergraduate students are interested in performing research, but often lack these abilities. Based on this observation, we emulated a common research environment within our ToC course by creating a mock conference assignment, where students (in groups) both wrote a technical paper solving an assigned problem and (individually) anonymously refereed other groups' papers. In this paper we discuss the details of this assignment and our experiences, and conclude with reflections and future work about similar courses.