For Computer Science graduate students Carol Reiley and Daniel Mirota, Facebook provided an ideal forum to teach about computer programming.
The two-credit Intersession course, titled Developing Photo and Video Apps for Online Social Networks, engaged students in hands-on programming to design their own Facebook applications.
Thirteen students designed Facebook applications as part of this new course.
"I really wanted to work on a class where students get really excited about the class. I wanted a project where students could work together and show their friends and feel a value of ownership in their work," Reiley said.
In addition, many of the photos are tagged with identification information, which could be used to facilitate automated computer interaction. This process draws upon Reiley's and Mirota's experience in computer vision, which aims to allow computers to see and interpret images around them, at the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.
Although initially envisioned as a graduate level course, the course was opened to undergraduates due to high demand. Seventeen out of 18 students who expressed interest were undergraduates, and students from majors outside of computer science were involved as well.
The course required the previous completion of undergraduate courses such as Intro to Programming, Linear Algebra and Matlab.
"We noticed there is a lack of face recognition on Facebook. We wanted to combine computer vision with cool web 2.0 [technology]. We wanted to see how far they [students] got in three weeks," Reiley said.
Among the objectives for the three-week course were, "to experience the software process of defining product release, designing a product, release and marketing." Class time was split between informational lectures designed to enhance student's broad understanding while also teaching specific skills. During laboratory time students were given free reign to develop their own applications.
"To our knowledge we were the only class teaching programming for the Facebook platform. In three weeks we were able to pump out apps. That's a ridiculously short time to learn and produce a product," Reiley said.
One application called "Admirer" allows users to view all their friend's pictures on one page. Other applications include "TextTrade," which helps students find each other when they are buying and selling books and "FaceMerge" which shows what the faces of two different people would look like when combined. "Photo Search" allows users to search Facebook for pictures that include themselves and specific friends.
"How people are using the Web is different, it's now a virtual world. How we teach programming should change as well. While it's great to have foundation classes there's all this new web 2.0 technology that should be incorporated in the curriculum and we hope classes like ours can be used as inspiration to teach other classes around the world," Reiley said.
The Digital Media Center will showcase the class's applications during their block party and students will have access to the Computer Science's resources to continue to improve their applications.
