The paper and presentation discussed the need for a Human Centred Creative Technology approach to the design and education of HCI and Media Technology. We briefly describe our current practice what HCI and Media technology design and education (should) look like, being grounded on a vision of the future of area of interest as informal, not‐necessarily goal‐directed and lightweight practice, associated the technology generation of ubiquitous computing, smartphone apps and the internet of things. It discusses some of the lessons learned from actual design, research and education, focusing on design as an exploratory process of mashing‐up functions, services and presentations in the context learning by doing: doing research, doing design and doing learning from each other. Finally, the paper discusses the underlying vision with respect to the content of the transition in research, education and design from the desktop‐oriented generation towards the ubiquitous, sensitive, smart, tangible, and networked ICT generation of the future.
CSERC: Automated Assessment
Honoring the theory that expertise is a consequence of deliberate practice, we propose the application of automatic assessment of programming exercises to enable instructors to provide adequate practice opportunities for students to start developing expert status in programming. A brief introduction to the theory of assessment serves as foundation for the evaluation of occurrences of automatic assessment reported in the literature. We gathered success factors and identified concerns related to automatic assessment through the analysis of experiences others have reported when designing and using automated assessment of programming assignments.
Vreda Pieterse explained the design of our own assessment software and discussed our experience of using it in relation to the above mentioned factors and concerns. Our reflection on this experience informs our proposed actions to improve future usage of automatic assessment of programming assignments at our institution.
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CSERC: Teaching with RAP
Teaching a formal method to business students can be quite challenging. For this purpose, the authors have developed RAP, a platform for researchers and students that supports the learning of rule‐based design in a formal method called Ampersand. Students perform design exercises in RAP, and researchers can collect measurements on the student’s behavior. RAP was designed to experiment with measurements of student behavior, for the purpose of studying the didactics of this specific subject.
In this presentation, the authors demonstrated the practice of RAP by showing how various measurements have led to meaningful hypotheses about student behavior. With RAP, the authors/presenters hope to increase their understanding of teaching formal methods and support students with design exercises.
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CSERC: Plagiarism Detection
Holmes is a plagiarism detection tool for Haskell programs. In this paper, we describe Holmes and show that it can detect plagiarism in a substantial corpus (2,122 Haskell submissions spread over 18 different assignments) of Haskell programs submitted by undergraduate students in a undergraduate level functional programming course over a period of ten years, and consider its sensitivity to superficial changes in the source code.
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CSERC: Online Courses & Study Success
This paper looks at how courses by experts that are available on the internet can be used to enhance student understanding of computer science prior to them entering or during their first year of study at a university. A secondary school exit skill‐set is proposed which is based on existing secondary school curricula and studies that have recently been conducted.
A selection of online courses from the internet is proposed in order to help students succeed in computer science at a university. These courses are selected by taking the secondary school skill‐set into account as well as the pedagogical setting of the course.
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Keynote CSERC: MOOC-Apocalypse
Wolff‐Michael Roth introduced the term ‘Apria’ to refer to the paradox of being a learner: how can we intentionally direct ourselves toward learning something new, when we necessarily do not yet understand – nor are we even able to perceive – the very thing that we seek to know?
Roth studied this in the context of high school students learning physics, showing how students were unable to draw the expected pedagogical lessons from classroom physics demonstrations. Because the students had not yet developed the underlying conceptual physics understandings, they literally did not perceive the behaviors of the instrumental apparatus as intended.
In the field of computer science, many of us have been surprised by the lasting result of the Rainfall problem, originally constructed and studied by Elliot Soloway. This work demonstrated the difficulty that beginning computing students have in composing a program that involves a loop, summation variable, and sentinel exit value.
As computer scientists, we are surprised when we learn of the enduring result of Soloway’s work, because the rainfall problem seems so easy. But this is because we’ve completely forgotten our own earlier novice minds, and we can’t imagine not knowing how to immediately solve what appears as a trivial problem. As a pathology, psychologists refer to this as ‘psychogenic amnesia’,’ but constructivists recognize this as a common aspect of learning.
These two challenges go hand in hand: the fundamental Apria of learning, and our own forgetfulness of learning afterward. We often pay attention on improving our teaching, but here, I will focus on the experience of being a learner in computer science. I will present a personal learning story of two years of effort in coming to understand Bayes Nets and Hidden Markov Models, a flipped classroom learning environment I created with one of the seminal MOOCs (Thrum and Nerving’s Fall 2011 AI Class), and two very different ‘Computing I’ courses.
Mark Audial has highlighted the looming ‘MOOC‐apocalypse’ – the belief that a combination of video lessons, auto‐graded assignments, and discussion forums can provide adequate learning environments for our students, coupled with academic leadership taking action on this belief by replacing conventionally‐taught courses with MOOCs. While there is evidence that MOOCs are effective for advanced, ‘auto‐didactic’ students, the evidence that MOOCs work for beginning or less self‐directed learners is scant (if it exists at all). And when we look broadly across our student body, it’s apparent that we have many more beginning students than advanced ones.
Ultimately, Fred Martin would argue that learning is messy, unpredictable, frustrating, and basically not at all fun – until it turns into elation and joy. Our beginning students deserve better than MOOCs: they deserve our personal attention. By better understanding the true nature of learning, we will be more able to make this case.
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Testing & Ask-Elle
Adding testing to Ask‐Elle: An Interactive Functional Programming Tutor: in this demonstration ASK‐ELLE is introduced: a Haskell tutor. ASK‐ELLE supports the incremental development of Haskell programs. ASK‐ELLE checks that a student follows one of the model solutions provided by a teacher. It can recognise many incomplete variants of the model solutions, it can give hints on how to proceed with solving a programming exercise, and feedback on incomplete student programs, but if a student implements an incorrect solution, or a solution that differs from the model solutions, ASK‐ELLE cannot give feedback. For this reason, we have added testing to ASK‐ELLE.
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CSERC: CS for Young Children
Computer science education often faces problems related to passive teaching and curricular constraints. These problems distort the students’ perception of computer science and thus lead to lack of interest in the curriculum and in related professions. The main goals of the project reported in this paper are (1) to excite and motivate students in computer science through creative activities, and (2) to introduce the idea of becoming creators of digital media through programming instead of remaining passive learners.
Based on the above goals, the presenters conducted field studies, collected data through student interviews, qualitatively analyzed the data and summarized the lessons learned through the project. Specifically, a group of researchers and artists designed and implemented two 2‐day workshops involving a total of 29 students, exploring their experiences with the program. The workshops were based on the open source software Scratch, as well as the creative use of recycled materials. The qualitative approach of the research is based on data collected through interviews, photos, and observations.
The results showed that: (a) the participants regarded the workshop as an overall positive experience, (b) creativity is an excellent mean to promote and teach programming, and (c) a workshop approach raises interest in computer science among female students in particular.
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CSERC: Guided Exploration
In this paper / presentation the presenters introduced Guided Exploration as an inductive teaching approach. It is based on Minimalism and makes use of the pattern format. Guided Exploration addresses a couple of problems when teaching tool‐related concepts and techniques, like how to address different student learning styles and how to address the issue that most students do not read the provided material as expected before starting to work. It also puts the focus on the concepts to be learned.
Köppe and Rodin described the design of a first course at our university where we applied Guided Exploration. The evaluation gives promising results and shows that at least some of the known problems are addressed by the new approach.
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2013_CSERC_Koppe_ea_proceedings.pdf
CSERC: Visualization in CS Education
In this article / presentation, we proposed a two‐perspective visualization approach to show how the visualization power can be utilized in explaining some computer science concepts during the lecture. Mainly, explaining an abstract concept in theoretical computer science requires a lot of imagination of the entities relations in the underlying algorithm or in the underlying data flow. Lecturers need the help of some of visualization techniques in conveying these complex concepts. Our proposed approach helps lecturers in conveying abstract concepts in computer science through producing visual representations from either static perspective or dynamic perspective, depending on the nature of the concept. We suggest an algorithm for the designer to help them in deciding which perspective might be used to visualize the underlying concept.