I had so much fun presenting the closing ITiCSE 2023 keynote “Chat Overflow: Artificially Intelligent Models for Computing Education – renAIssance or apocAlypse?” with Paul Denny, Juho Leinonen and James Prather. Rather than ramble on here, I’ll just provide links to the video and slides 🙂 Thanks to Mikko-Jussi Laakso and the ITiCSE 2023 team for inviting us!
ITiCSE 2021, the 26th annual conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, is being held virtually in Paderborn, Germany. The main conference is June 28 – July 1. More information and registration is on the website https://ITiCSE.acm.org.
Today I am presenting my third and final paper at the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. It is titled “What Do CS1 Syllabi Reveal About Our Expectations of Introductory Programming Students?” My coauthor is Thomas Fitzpatrick who was at the time an undergraduate student at UCD and is now pursuing a PhD there. Full details including the full paper, slides, and dataset we used in the paper are available at cszero.
I was thrilled to learn that a paper I co-authored, First Things First: Providing Metacognitive Scaffolding for Interpreting Problem Prompts, was selected for the best Computer Science Education Research paper award at the 2019 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education.
I had a great time working on this project with my co-authors: James Prather, Ray Pettit, Paul Denny, Dastyni Loksa, Alani Peters, Zachary Albrecht and Krista Masci, and I look forward to future work with them in this area. The paper will be presented on Friday, March 1 at SIGCSE 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at 11:10AM. Full details are available over on cszero.
Today Keith Quille and I presented our SIGCSE 2019 paper “50 Years of CS1 at SIGCSE: A Review of the Evolution of Introductory Programming Education Research” which was published as part of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education’s Technical Symposium 50th Anniversary Celebration. We had a great time writing this paper and even more fun presenting it at a special discussant-led session that lasted a whole hour and fifteen minutes! Full details including paper, slides, and supplementary data here.
This is a final call for my survey of Introductory Programming modules (courses) at third-level institutions in Ireland and Northern Ireland. If you happen to teach a current Introduction to Programming course (during any semester) I would really appreciate if you would be willing to complete the survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Ireland_CS1). If you don’t teach on an intro course, but know someone who is, I would similarly appreciate you spreading the word!
The survey will close on April 15. If you have already completed the survey, thank you!
The details:
I am interested in modules at Universities, Institutes of Technology as well as private colleges. This survey is motivated by surveys already undertaken in Australia and New Zealand (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2667507) and the UK (https://repository.cardiffmet.ac.uk/handle/10369/8417) over the past number of years. The questions in this survey closely follow the questions in the latest UK and Australasian surveys to allow us to compare trends in Ireland to those in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. I am very grateful to Ellen Murphy and James Davenport of the University of Bath who generously provided us with their survey questions.
The survey is designed to determine what languages, tools, and paradigms are in use in Irish introductory programming modules and the reasons for these choices. It is hoped that this survey will be taken on a regular basis so that a clearer picture of trends in this area can be created to help those involved in teaching introductory programming.
If you are an introductory programming lecturer I would very much appreciate you completing this survey and I would also appreciate if you could share this link with others at your institution (or elsewhere in Ireland) that teach introductory programming.
The survey is here:Â https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Ireland_CS1
If you have any questions, you can contact me here.
Last week I was fortunate to attend a seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl. Seminar 18061 was titled: Evidence About Programmers for Programming Language Design. Read more about it over on CS0. It was a unique, immersive, possibly once-in-a-lifetime experience of computer science flavoured academic inquiry.
I excited to be conducting a survey of Introductory Programming modules (courses) at third-level institutions in Ireland and Northern Ireland (Details and survey link are here). The survey is modelled on previous surveys conducted in Australasia and the UK. If you happen to teach a current Introduction to Programming course (during any semester) at any Irish third-level university, institute of technology, or private college, I would really appreciate if you would be willing to complete the survey. If you don’t teach on an intro course, but know someone who is, I would appreciate you spreading the word!