Theory of computing (ToC) courses are a staple in many undergraduate CS curricula as they lay the foundation of why CS is important to students. Although not a stated goal, an inevitable outcome of the course is enhancing the students' technical reading and writing abilities as it often contains formal reasoning and proof writing. Separately, many undergraduate students are interested in performing research, but often lack these abilities. Based on this observation, we emulated a common research environment within our ToC course by creating a mock conference assignment, where students (in groups) both wrote a technical paper solving an assigned problem and (individually) anonymously refereed other groups' papers. In this paper we discuss the details of this assignment and our experiences, and conclude with reflections and future work about similar courses.

翻译：计算理论（ToC）课程是许多本科计算机科学课程的核心内容，它们为学生奠定了计算机科学重要性的基础。尽管并非明确目标，但该课程的一个必然结果是提升学生的技术阅读与写作能力，因为它通常包含形式化推理和证明写作。此外，许多本科生对从事研究感兴趣，但往往缺乏这些能力。基于这一观察，我们在ToC课程中模拟了一种常见的研究环境，通过创建模拟会议作业，让学生（分组）撰写解决指定问题的技术论文，并（单独）对其他小组的论文进行匿名评审。本文讨论了该作业的细节及我们的经验，最后针对类似课程提出反思与未来工作方向。