Category Archives: cszero.wordpress.com

ITiCSE 2022, Dublin – Early Bird Registration Closes May 31!

ACM, Computing, Conferences, cszero.wordpress.com, Education, Ireland, SIGCSE

Registration for ITiCSE 2022 is now open at iticse.acm.org/2022 and Early-Bird registration closes May 31 so now is the time to register!

This year ITiCSE is being held in Dublin, Ireland at University College Dublin.

Conference dates are July 11th to July 13th, 2022. There is a reception on Sunday evening, July 10, along with the traditional ITiCSE excursion and banquet on Tuesday afternoon and evening.

Held annually in Europe, the ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education is the second-oldest and second-largest computer science education conference. 

This year there were a record number of paper submissions (276) of which 79 accepted papers will be delivered over three days in five parallel sessions, in addition to panels, posters, special sessions, nine working groups, and three keynotes: 
  • Professor Letizia Jaccheri, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU): “Gender Issues in Computer Science Research, Education and Society”
  • Titus Winters, Principal Engineer at Google: “The Gap Between Industry and CS Education”
  • Elizabeth Oldham, Trinity College Dublin: “Computing in the Irish School Curriculum: What Can We Learn from a Fifty-Year Adventure?”
Details including a provisional program are available at iticse.acm.org/2022.

UK and Ireland Computing Education Research Conference

Conferences, cszero.wordpress.com, Education, Ireland, SIGCSE

This year, Neil Brown and I are serving as program co-chairs of the new UK and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference. It will be held at the University of Kent on 5-6th September 2019. The committee includes Janet Carter as conference chair, along with Sally Fincher, Quintin Cuttsand Steven Bradley. Steven has been running the Computing Education Practice conference at Durham for the past few years, which has grown impressively. We believe that there is a growing community of computing education researchers in the UK and Ireland, but we do not have a local conference to support this community’s growth. Our hope is that this sister conference to CEP will provide a useful outlet to share Irish and British computing education research, and encourage research collaborations.

The conference will run roughly from lunchtime on the 5th to lunchtime on the 6th, with some collaboration-building events beforehand and some workshops afterwards. We thus invite submissions of research papers (max 6 pages, ACM format), and proposals for 1-2 hour workshops, by the beginning of June. More details are available on the conference website. Please feel free to send any questions to [email protected] and please do share this news with anyone you think might be interested in submitting or attending. We hope to see a variety of researchers and educators for all age groups.

SIGCSE 2019 paper #3: What Do CS1 Syllabi Reveal About Our Expectations of Introductory Programming Students?

Computing, Conferences, cszero.wordpress.com, Education, Programming, SIGCSE

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.

SIGCSE 2019 Paper #2 – Best Paper Award

Computing, Conferences, cszero.wordpress.com, Education, Programming, SIGCSE

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.

SIGCSE 2019 paper #1: 50 Years of CS1 at SIGCSE: A Review of the Evolution of Introductory Programming Education Research

Computing, Conferences, cszero.wordpress.com, Education, Programming, SIGCSE

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.

Final call: Calling all Irish Introductory Programming lecturers!

Computing, cszero.wordpress.com, Programming

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: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Ireland_CS1

If you have any questions, you can contact me here.

Dagstuhl Seminar 18061: Evidence about programmers for programming language design

Computing, cszero.wordpress.com, Programming

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.

Irish Third-Level Introduction to Programming Lecturer Survey

Computing, cszero.wordpress.com, Education, Programming

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!

Introducing computer science to Irish schools

Computing, cszero.wordpress.com, Education, Programming

On monday the Irish government anounced more strategy for their plan to introduce programming to the primary and secondary curricula. As currently set out, this will take place through the mathematics curriculum (at least at the primary level). As part of the wider plan, Computer Science will be introduced as a secondary level (high school) subject, a development I have also been following recently.

The Digital Strategy for Schools 2015-2020 plan for 2017, which was launched by Minister for Education Richard Bruton yesterday, seeks to increase the use of ICT (information and communications technology) in Irish schools and includes the introduction of a benchmarking system from this September to allow teachers to track their progress in using digital technologies when teaching. Read more over at CSzero.