MARS is a GUI-based interactive development environment (IDE) to support programming in MIPS assembly language. MIPS is a RISC-based computer architecture most popularly taught in the textbook Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy. Ken teaches the computer organization course at SMSU and was looking for a viable alternative to the SPIM simulator developed at the University of Wisconsin. Simulators are important for MIPS instruction because few computer science or engineering departments possess a computer based on the MIPS architecture.

Development of MARS began in earnest in 2003 with a command-based assembler and simulator and continued into 2004 with the GUI framework built on top to make it much more pleasant to use. MARS offers outstanding support for runtime simulation, with a number of features to support breakpoints, stepped execution, interactive viewing and direct modification of memory and register values, and more.

In 2006 MARS was extended to include a "tool plug-in" capability. A "tool" is a class that interacts with the virtual MIPS machine at execution time and does something useful or interesting with that information. One such tool observes MIPS memory usage and simulates the functionality of a cache memory unit. Another implements a "scavenger hunt" game that communicates with student MIPS programs via MIPS memory.

We presented a poster on MARS at the 2005 SIGCSE Technical Symposium in St. Louis and a paper at the 2006 SIGCSE Technical Symposium in Houston. Both were well-received and we anticipate exciting times to come! We have also presented MARS at CCSC conferences as both papers and tutorials. We are both teaching professors so we work on MARS mostly during the summer.

MARS can be downloaded from http://www.cs.missouristate.edu/MARS/

This paper, presented at CCSC Midwest Region conference in 2003, addresses the state of service-learning in computer science education. It introduces service-learning and information resources for service-learning. IT also surveys published accounts of service-learning applied in the computer science curriculum at various colleges and universities. I have been involved in service-learning since 1998. Student service-learning experiences have for the most part consisted of team development of specialized software for non-profit organizations. At Southwest Missouri State University, the software was developed as the Software Engineering course project with one additional credit for a service learning course. At Otterbein College, the software is developed as the students' capstone Programming Practicum project.

This paper was presented at the 2000 SIGCSE Technical Symposium in Austin. It introduces service learning but focuses on a framework through which interested institutions can develop and sustain a service learning component in their computer science curriculum. It addresses issues such as institutional and departmental support, establishing service learning courses, considerations in the development of service learning projects and selecting community partners, and assessment.

 NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship, 1996.

 NASA is committed to the timely development and delivery of operational systems within budget constraints. These goals can be achieved only by applying a model for software development risk management. Such a model must consider the dimensions of risk, risk activities, risk factors, and risk metrics. This project considers metrics for managing risk in the development of object-oriented software at JPL.

 NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship, 1995.

 As object-oriented software development methods come into more widespread use, basic questions of software quality assurance must be revisited. We will highlight efforts now underway at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to both assess the quality of software systems developed using object-oriented technology and develop guidelines for future development of such systems. The current focus is on design and code reusability, and system size estimation. A number of metrics are proposed, and two JPL software systems measured and analyzed. The preliminary results reported here should be particularly useful to software development and quality assurance personnel working in a C++ implementation environment.
 

My graduate school research followed two paths, one in the design of object-oriented simulations languages. Quite a progressive thing for 1988! The other was software structures to support adaptive user interface systems. The latter became the basis for my 1991 Ph.D. dissertation. Five years later, such adaptive systems became all the rage on the Web but by that time I was a teaching professor with few resources to devote to a renewed pursuit. Hard to believe, but my original adaptive user interface was implemented using text graphics on a DOS platform in C++! This was just before Windows 3.1 made that a viable platform.