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.
CompEd 2019 – Call for Reviewers
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ACM Global Computing Education Conference
17-19 May 2019, Chengdu, China, www.acmcomped.org
We invite expressions of interest in serving as a reviewer or an associate program chair (APC) for full papers, or a reviewer for posters. If you are interested, please let us know by completing the form at http://www.acmcomped.org/reviewers/.
For more information about CompEd 2019, see the CfP at http://www.acmcomped.org/call-
Important Dates: All deadlines refer to 23:59 Anywhere on Earth on that day
* Tuesday, 16 October 2018: Paper Abstracts (250 words maximum)
* Tuesday, 23 October 2018: Full Papers, Panels, Working Groups
* Tuesday, 11 December 2018: BoFs and Posters
Feel free to contact me if you have questions about CompEd 2019. I am happy to be serving as the Chair of the CompEd Steering Committee.
Some colleagues and I are conducting a study to find out what questions people who teach computing would most like researchers to answer. If you teach programming, web design, or anything else that involves writing code of any kind, in classrooms or otherwise, at any level, we would like to invite you to take part.
Our study will be done in two parts: the first involves collecting possible research questions and the second involves ranking the questions collected. As a participant, you will be involved in only one of these parts, and your participation will take no more than 5-10 minutes.
If you would like to take part, please provide us with your name and email address at:
https://goo.gl/forms/5j18OK6J6bgRvh6D3
We will randomly assign you to one of the two rounds (either collecting questions or ranking questions) and contact you shortly thereafter to participate. You may choose to be entered into a draw for a $250 gift card.
If you can’t reach the above link due to geographical restrictions, please feel free to email any of us (details below).
Thank you very much – we greatly appreciate your contribution!
This study has Ethics Approval from the University of Toronto (Protocol #: 00036495)
I am proud to be serving as Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM Global Computing Education Conference (CompEd). CompEd is the 4th conference to be sponsored by SIGCSE.
The first CompEd will be held in Chengdu, China in May, 2019. We are considering a site in India for the second offering. The language of the conference will be English, and we are projecting a 33% acceptance rate.
The conference may be held anywhere on Earth, outside North America and Europe, where the other three SIGCSE conferences are frequent: the SIGCSE Technical Symposium (always held in the US), ITiCSE (always held in Europe*), and ICER which floats between North America, Europe, and Australasia.
*In 2016 ITiCSE was held in Peru, and this was part of the decision to launch a 4th ‘global’ conference.
More information on the conference can be found here. I will be sharing regular updates here and at CS0 as things progress.
Please note that a candidate has been selected for this proposal and we are not seeking further applications. If you would be interested in similar opportunities, please contact me via email and provide your CV. I expect a similar position coming up later this year.
University College Dublin, CeADAR (Ireland’s National Centre for Applied Data Analytics and Research), and Adaptemy, are seeking a candidate for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow specializing in Artificial Intelligence in Education. Link to flyer for more information here.
Please email me with queries or to express interest:
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!
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.