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!
In 2006 Renzo Davoli chaired the ACM SIGCSE Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Conference (ITiCSE 2006) in Bologna Italy. Renzo purchased a brass bell (pictured below). At the conference he would walk through the coffee break area ringing the bell encouraging folks to return to sessions. The bell then went “missing” but it is believed that it sat in Bologna for over a decade until ITiCSE 2017 which conveniently for the bell, was also in Bologna, chaired by Renzo and Mikey Goldweber. The bell then began a new life of travel. It was given to Irene Polycarpou and Janet Reed who chaired ITiCSE 2018 in Larnaca, Cyprus. The bell then traveled by itself via post to Aberdeen Scotland for ITiCSE 2019 where Bruce Scharlau and Roger McDermott rang the bell.
Then the bell, aided by a pandemic, sat again for years. In 2022 the bell traveled all on its own by post to Dublin, Ireland where myself and Keith Quille spent some time ringing the bell at ITiCSE 2022. It then sat in Dublin on my desk for a year until this week when – the bell was happy to hear – was escorted by hand on a Finnair flight to Turku, Finland. This morning I handed it to Mikko-Jussi Laakso who just a few minutes ago rang the bell to open ITiCSE 2023. The bell will later this week travel – accompanied again – this time by Mattia Monga, to its ancestral home of Italy where Mattia will, in one year, ring the bell for ITiCSE 2024 in Milan.
Where the bell will go from there is not yet known. However, given that ITiCSE 2023 is the first physical attendance only conference since 2019 and has around 250 people in attendance, the bell has a long healthy future of European travel ahead at many future ACM ITiCSE conferences.
Thanks to Mikey Goldweber and Bruce Scharlau for helping me piece together the history of the ITiCSE bell which I am happy to pass on to the community.
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.
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.
This year I’m thrilled to be serving as the SIGCSE 2020 International Liaison. Although I originally hail from the US, I’ve been based in Ireland for decades and I attend US conferences as an “international” attendee. My first SIGCSE Technical Symposium was a bit overwhelming. I knew (of) many of those who attended my talk but they definitely didn’t know me! I also didn’t really connect much. It wasn’t until I participated in an ITiCSE working group that I really began to get involved in the SIGCSE community.
A number of recent comments have indicated opportunities to improve the experiences of SIGCSE attendees who are traveling from outside the US, and in particular for those attendees who are relative newcomers to the Symposium.
For the last decade (2010-2019 inclusive) the average symposium attendance was 1385. The average number of non-US attendees was 101 (7%). Excluding Canada, this falls to 71 (5%). In 2019, a record attendance year, these numbers were actually slightly lower percentage-wise. We would like to see these numbers improve.
I am happy to announce that this year the SIGCSE Symposium is piloting an “International Buddy Program”. Simply put, the program pairs up non-US attendees with more experienced attendees (from anywhere) to try and improve the experience of those coming from outside the US, and particularly those who are relatively new to the Symposium or the community. Everyone who registers for the Symposium will have an opportunity during registration, to sign up to be paired-up, either as a non-US attendee or as an experienced attendee. Of course this is optional! More details are available at https://www.brettbecker.com/sigcse2020/
I’d also like to thank the expanded International Committee for their service this year (listed below).
If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly.
Finally, if you are from outside the US and going to Portland, don’t forget to sign up for the international lunch during registration!
SIGCSE 2020 International Committee
| Miles Berry | University of Roehampton |
| Steven Bradley | Durham University |
| Jennifer Campbell | University of Toronto |
| Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas | UTEC |
| Paul Denny | University of Auckland |
| Rodrigo Duran | Aalto University |
| Orit Hazzan | Technion |
| Arto Hellas | University of Helsinki |
| Amey Karkare | IIT Kanpur |
| Carsten Kleiner | Hochschule Hannover |
| Viraj Kumar | Indian Institute of Science |
| Chao Mbogo | Kenya Methodist University |
| Chris McDonald | University of Western Australia |
| André Santos | Instituto Universitário de Lisboa |
| Marco Silva | Federal University of Technology |
| Lenandlar Singh | University of Guyana |
| Hironori Washizaki | Waseda University |
| Gary Wong | University of Hong Kong |
| Ming Zhang | Peking University |
This paper deadline for the first UKICER conference is June 7. Please see https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/events/2019/UKICER2019/index.html for the call for papers and submission deadlines. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
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.
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.