Computer science courses use mobile apps to make coursework relevant — from The Washington Post

The Virginia Tech student’s concern about buses, Tilevich said, offered a chance to show students that coding can be relevant. By the end of the semester, the advanced software engineering class had partnered with the city transit system to obtain data from Global Positioning System devices on dozens of city buses. An algorithm soon was predicting arrival times and beaming the information to a prototype mobile application.

“Sometimes as faculty members, we have to step back. We have to let them run wild,” said Tilevich, a former professional clarinet player who blogs about his teaching experiments.

Originally saw this at GetIdeas.org