COVID in the classroom

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a vast array of challenges for colleges and universities all over the world. Many of those challenges remain as we navigate COVID's long tail, its wide-spread and long-lasting effects continuing to be felt. Awful as those effects are, being wide-spread and long-lasting makes them both practical and useful as real-world common ground motivation for teaching topics in computer science. In fact, the author has already done so. In addition to teaching in full-time faculty of the Computer Science department, he was a key member of the COVID-19 testing and screening team at Marist College during the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, modeling pooled testing protocols in C++ and Java as well as designing and implementing database systems for generating representative samples of the college population for surveillance testing, results tracking, and compliance monitoring. These experiences prompted new, meaningful, hands-on ways to integrate computer science theory with real-world practice in an immediate and authentic manner as the faculty and students were living a common firsthand experience in real time. Even once this pandemic has receded fully into the past, this experience serves as an example of ways we can incorporate events affecting student and faculty lives into computer science courses. This article describes three of those ways.