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Themes and Results from ACM’s International Computing Education Research (ICER) Workshop Series

Themes and Results from ACM’s International Computing Education Research (ICER) Workshop Series. Mark Guzdial Professor, School of Interactive Computing College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology. ACM International Computing Education Research Workshop .

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Themes and Results from ACM’s International Computing Education Research (ICER) Workshop Series

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  1. Themes and Results from ACM’s International Computing Education Research (ICER) Workshop Series Mark Guzdial Professor, School of Interactive Computing College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology

  2. ACM International Computing Education Research Workshop • Created as an outlet for the “Bootstrapping” and “Scaffolding” efforts to re-create CS Education Research in the United States. • Funded by National Science Foundation (Andy Bernat) • Josh Tenenberg (U Wash) with Sally Fincher and Marion Petre • Built around Multi-Institutional, Multi-National (MIMN) studies. • Why do things go wrong? Because of teacher? School? Approach? • Or maybe because learning CS is just hard? All ICER Papers can be found at http://www.acm.org/dl

  3. Building from Teaching to Research All ICER Papers can be found at http://www.acm.org/dl

  4. Why do CS students fail their first course?

  5. Why do students drop out of their first course?

  6. Why do students fail their first CS course?

  7. What do students know about computing before they start? (Part 1)

  8. What do students know about computing before they start? (Part 2)

  9. What do students know about computing before they start? (Part 3)

  10. Whether “Objects-first” really matters

  11. What Developers really do

  12. Questions?

  13. Media Computation: Teaching Computing to Everyone • Fall 1999: All students at Georgia Tech must take a course in computer science. • Considered part of General Education, like mathematics, social science, humanities… • 1999-2003: Only one course met the requirement. • Shackelford’s pseudocode approach in 1999 • Later Scheme: How to Design Programs (MIT Press)

  14. One-class CS1: Pass (A, B, or C) vs. WDF (Withdrawal, D or F)

  15. Contextualized Computing Education • What’s going on? • Research results: Computing is “tedious, boring, irrelevant” • Since Spring 2003, Georgia Tech teaches three introductory CS courses. • Based on Margolis and Fisher’s “alternative paths” • Each course introduces computing using a context (examples, homework assignments, lecture discussion) relevant to majors. • Make computing relevant by teaching it in terms of what computers are good for (from the students’ perspective)

  16. Media Computation:Teaching in a Relevant Context • Presenting CS topics with media projects and examples • Iteration as creating negative and grayscale images • Indexing in a range as removing redeye • Algorithms for blending both images and sounds (weighted sums) and for scaling (sampling). • Information encodings as sound visualizations 16

  17. Results:CS1“Media Computation”

  18. Survey One Year Later • 19% of respondents had programmed since class ended "Did the class change how you interact with computers?” • 80% say “Yes” • “Definitely makes me think of what is going on behind the scenes of such programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.” • 'I understand technological concepts more easily now; I am more willing and able to experience new things with computers now’ • 'I have learned more about the big picture behind computer science and programming. This has helped me to figure out how to use programs that I've never used before.’

  19. Results at Gainesville College • Similar results at a 2 year public college. • What is relevance? • Not useful for degree. • Somewhat useful for career. • Mostly useful for life. • Would you like more CS? • GT 15.2% “Strongly Disagree.” <25% agree. • More MediaComp? GT and Gainesville over 40% agree. (Tew, Fowler, Guzdial, SIGCSE 2005) (Tew, Fowler, Guzdial, SIGCSE 2005)

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