Susan H. Rodger is a Professor of the Practice in the Computer Science Department at Duke University. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1989 to 1994. She received a PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University in 1989, an MS in Computer Science from Purdue University in 1985, and a BS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from North Carolina State University in 1983. Rodger works in the areas of visualization and interaction, and computer science education. The main projects she has major contributions in are visualization and interaction software for education in theoretical computer science, computing in K-12 and peer-led team learning. She also has high-functioning autism and a verbal disability and spoke about her struggles with both in a keynote talk at SIGCSE 2023.
Rodger has developed educational software and materials, co-authored two books, co-created an online Coursera specialization on Java (with five short courses), co-created an online Coursera course on Alice, and published over fifty-five journal and conference publications. Rodger's research has been supported by over 13 National Science Foundation grants, eight IBM Faculty Awards, and other funding from IBM, Google, Coursera, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard.
She was the chair of the AP Computer Science Development Committee from 1997-2000 and a member of the AP Computer Science Development Committee from 1995-2001. This was a time when the exam moved from Pascal to C++, which was very controversial, then moving to Java five years later. She was involved in panels at SIGCSE conferences with lively discussions about C++ and Java. She was a member of the ACM Education Policy Committee from 2008-2017. This committee created CS Education Week every December.
Rodger was on the ACM SIGCSE Board for nine years as Secretary (2010-2013), as Board Chair (2013-2016) and as Immediate Past Chair (2016-2019). On the Board, she led the effort to create SIGCSE's fourth conference, ACM CompEd, to go places where SIGCSE's other three conferences are not held, every other year. She then was on ACM CompEd's Steering Committee from 2018-2024. The first ACM CompEd conference was held successfully in Chengdu, China, and the second ACM CompEd conference was held in Hyderabad, India in 2024 (delayed due to the pandemic). She has also been involved with the SIGCSE Technical Symposium in many ways. She was co-Chair for SIGCSE 2008 with J.D. Dougherty. They realized the need for Supporters and managed to get several new Supporters for 2008. They also created the SIGCSE Kids Camp in 2008, a daycare and enrichment program during the SIGCSE Technical Symposium that has continued to this day. After the 2008 conference, she led the effort to create a new position, Supporter/Exhibitor Liaison, to be a consistant role to build contacts with Supporters and Exhibitors, and then held that role from 2008 to 2014. Other SIGCSE Technical Symposium roles she has held include Program co-chair for SIGCSE 2007, and Panels and Special Sessions Chair for SIGCSE 2005. In 2024 she became a member of the pro tempore SIGCSE Doctoral Consortium Steering Committee that defined roles and materials to create a permanent SIGCSE Doctoral Steering Committee in charge of Doctoral Consortiums at all SIGCSE conferences. Also in 2024 she became a member of the SIGCSE ITICSE Steering Committee.
Rodger is currently Co-Chair of the Computer Research Association Committee on Widening Participation (CRA-WP) since 2022 and has been a member of the CRA-WP Board (formerly CRA-W) since 2010. As Co-Chair she raises funds for CRA-WP programs and coordinates a thirty person board, who all work on projects or programs for those underrepresented groups in computing research, from undergraduates to mid-career researchers. As a CRA-WP Board member she has co-organized two Graduate Cohort Workshops for female graduate students and over ten workshops on Early and Mid Career Mentoring for female faculty and graduate students. Both of these mentoring workshops are 2-day in-person workshops with panels from senior researchers and 1-1 mentoring sessions.
Rodger has organized four Alice Symposiums and over forty workshops on Alice, JFLAP, Peer-led Team learning, and other computer science education topics. She has supervised over one hundred undergraduates and fifteen masters students in research projects, and co-advised one Ph.D. student.
Rodger received the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education 2023, the IEEE Computer Society 2019 Taylor L. Booth Education Award, Duke University Trinity College 2019 David and Janet Vaughn Brooks Distinguished Teaching Award, ACM 2013 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, NCWIT Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award in 2020, the ACM Distinguished Educator award in 2006, and she was one of two finalist candidates for the 2007 NEEDS Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware for the software JFLAP. She was inducted into the NCSU Computer Science Alumni Hall of Fame in 2019, and awarded Purdue University Distinguished Woman Scholar in 2022.
Rodger has developed JFLAP, software for experimenting with formal languages and automata, for thirty years with forty-eight students. Rodger started developing software tools for the area of formal languages and automata in 1990. The first tool developed was NPDA, then expanding into FLAP (Formal Languages and Automata Package) with Finite State Machines, NPDA and Turing Machines. Many related tools were developed along the way such as JeLLRap, LLparse, PumpLemma, and Pate. In 1996, the FLAP software was converted to Java and renamed JFLAP.
With JFLAP one can build and experiment with several types of automata (finite state machine, pushdown automata, multi-tape Turing machine, Moore and Mealy machines), regular expressions and several types of grammars (regular, context-free, and unrestricted). One can experiment with proofs such as NFA to DFA, DFA to minimal state DFA, NPDA to CFG, CFG to NPDA, etc. One can experiment with parsing algorithms including brute-force, LL(1), SLR(1), and CYK. Additionally, one can experiment with L-systems and pumping lemmas for both regular and context-free languages.
JFLAP is the leading educational tool for formal languages and automata theory and is used around the world in several types of courses including formal languages and automata, compilers, artificial intelligence, and discrete mathematics. In 2006 JFLAP had already been downloaded from over 160 countries. Here is a list of schools and other statistics on its use in 2008. Google Analytics was added to the JFLAP page on Sept. 13, 2012. For the period from Sept 2012-May 31 2022 there were 911,874 sessions with 714,535 new users and 3,344,414 pageviews. JFLAP 6.1 was recognized as one of two finalist candidates in the NEEDS Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware competition in 2007. Here is the press release, and the submission packet that contains 68 letters in support of JFLAP. From the jflap.org page are listed 9 books that use JFLAP in some way including Rodger and her student Thomas Finley's book entitled "JFLAP - An Interactive Formal Languages and Automata Package", published in 2006. Also listed on jflap.org are over fifteen JFLAP papers written by Rodger, and over thirty-five papers written by others that use JFLAP in some way such as modifying it or using it in a class. In Rodger's 2009 SIGCSE paper she describes a two-year study on JFLAP with fourteen universities that shows the majority of students felt that having access to JFLAP made learning course concepts easier, made them feel more engaged in the course and made the course more enjoyable. The JFLAP project has been supported by six National Science Foundation grants.
A December 2011 paper in ACM Inroads by P. Chakraborty, P.C. Saxena, and C. P. Katti entitled Fifty years of automata simulation: a review wrote the following about JFLAP for an automata simulator. "The effort put into developing this tool is unparalleled in the field of simulation of automata. As a result, today it is the most sophisticated tool for simulating automata. It now covers a large number of topics on automata and related fields. The tool is also the best documented among the tools for simulation of automata." "The tool uses state of the art graphics and is one of the easiest to use. The tool is undoubtedly the most widely used tool for simulation of automata developed to date. Thousands of students have used it at numerous universities in more than a hundred countries."
Rodger co-authored "An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata," Seventh Edition, with Peter Linz in 2023, published by Jones & Bartlett Learning LLC. The first part of the book was labeled "Theory" and Rodger wrote a new part labeled "Applications" with three chapters on parsing, LL parsing and LR parsing to show how the theory students learn in the first part of the book (specifically finite state automata, pushdown automata, and context-free grammars) is applied to an application that students can relate to: "How did the compiler identify that I had an error on line 42 of my program?"
Rodger has also done work in algorithm animation creating several animations or other tools, such as creating the scripting language JAWAA to easily create animations over the web. With JAWAA one can animate both primitive shapes and data structures such as arrays, lists, stacks and queues.
Rodger is a leader in integrating computing into K-12 using the Alice 3-D virtual worlds programming environment. The Adventures in Alice Programming project has been supported by National Science Foundation ITEST and ITEST Scale-up grants totaling 3.8 million dollars with additional support from IBM. She has run four Alice Symposiums and over twenty-five Alice Workshops, with the largest Symposium having over 120 attendees. She has taught Alice in one-week to three-week workshops to over 500 K-12 teachers who have taught Alice to over 10,000 students. She has developed free curriculum materials targetted to middle school and high school students that include over 120 curriculum materials including tutorials on programming and animation topics and challenge worlds to complete. At her two-week or longer workshops, K-12 teachers have developed over 300 lesson plans that include a sample Alice world that are also available for free. Teachers attending the workshops are in a wide range of disciplines including mathematics, science, language arts, history, music, art, foreign language, english as second language, business technology, computer applications and physical education. She has supervised over 30 undergraduate student projects on Alice and integrating computing into K-12 disciplines. Google analytics show that as of May 31, 2022 the Duke Alice web page had 55,072 users, 72,692 sessions and 95,895 page views since September 2012 when we started tracking it.
Rodger is a leader in integrating peer-led team learning (PLTL) into computer science. PLTL had been used in Chemistry successfully. Rodger and Horwitz led an effort to integrate PLTL into computer science as part of a collaborative effort with eight universities on a project supported by an NSF ITWF grant. That project resulted in the pltlcs.org website, curriculum materials on PLTL CS, and four workshops on PLTL including one two-day workshop held at Duke University in 2007 with 73 participants. A Peer-led team learning 2009 SIGCSE paper shows that active recruiting combined with PLTL was an effective approach to attracting and retaining under-represented students in an introductory CS course.
Rodger teamed up with Owen Astrachan, Drew Hilton and Robert Duvall and developed a Coursera specialization called Java Programming and Software Engineering Fundamentals that launched in September 2015 and is a current Coursera specialization. The specialization contains five 4-week courses. The first course is Programming Foundations with JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The remaining courses focus on learning Java, with the last course a capstone project to build a recommender system. They have had over 147,000 course completions. Rodger created a new Coursera course with Stephen Cooper on the Alice 3 programming language entitled Introduction to Programming and Animation with Alice that launched in January 2020. A beta version of that course with K-12 teachers ran in Summer 2019 and Fall 2019.