Technology In Computer Science Education Research Articles

ITiCSE 2023 Preview

The 28th annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) will take place in Turku, Finland, hosted by Turku University.

Eco-Literacy Citizenship Education Materials Based on Cultural Value: Research and Development Study at Universitas Negeri Medan

This study aims to develop and validate Eco-Literacy Citizenship Education materials based on cultural value. This teaching material was developed in the Citizenship Education (PKn) subject in Higher Education. The development of teaching materials aims to strengthen citizenship competence, especially students' responsible attitudes towards various global issues such as the environment. The teaching materials developed integrate the principles of environmental awareness and the values ​​of Indonesian local wisdom. The method used is research and development (R&D) by Borg and Gall (1983). Data collection techniques through questionnaires and interviews. The subjects in this study were adjusted to the stages of the research. For introduction, the respondents were 30 Universitas Negeri Medan’s students from the three of study programs, namely Elementary School Teacher Education, Computer Science Engineering Education and Pancasila and Citizenship Education. At the planning stage and initial product development, the subjects of the research were 4 lecturers of Citizenship Education courses. While at the stage of field testing, the subjects of the research were 2 experts on the subject of Citizenship Education. The results of the study indicate that Eco-literacy Citizenship Education Materials based on cultural value are needed to strengthen student citizenship competencies. Expert validation results get an average score of 86.50. These results indicate that the teaching materials developed are categorized as suitable for use in the next test.

ITiCSE 2022 call for participation

The 27th annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) will take place in Dublin, Ireland, hosted by University College Dublin (UCD), with support from the Technological University of Dublin (TU Dublin).

A Systematic Literature Review of Empiricism and Norms of Reporting in Computing Education Research Literature

Context. Computing Education Research (CER) is critical to help the computing education community and policy makers support the increasing population of students who need to learn computing skills for future careers. For a community to systematically advance knowledge about a topic, the members must be able to understand published work thoroughly enough to perform replications, conduct meta-analyses, and build theories. There is a need to understand whether published research allows the CER community to systematically advance knowledge and build theories. Objectives. The goal of this study is to characterize the reporting of empiricism in Computing Education Research literature by identifying whether publications include content necessary for researchers to perform replications, meta-analyses, and theory building. We answer three research questions related to this goal: (RQ1) What percentage of papers in CER venues have some form of empirical evaluation? (RQ2) Of the papers that have empirical evaluation, what are the characteristics of the empirical evaluation? (RQ3) Of the papers that have empirical evaluation, do they follow norms (both for inclusion and for labeling of information needed for replication, meta-analysis, and, eventually, theory-building) for reporting empirical work? Methods. We conducted a systematic literature review of the 2014 and 2015 proceedings or issues of five CER venues: Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS), International Symposium on Computing Education Research (ICER), Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), and Computer Science Education (CSE). We developed and applied the CER Empiricism Assessment Rubric to the 427 papers accepted and published at these venues over 2014 and 2015. Two people evaluated each paper using the Base Rubric for characterizing the paper. An individual person applied the other rubrics to characterize the norms of reporting, as appropriate for the paper type. Any discrepancies or questions were discussed between multiple reviewers to resolve. Results. We found that over 80% of papers accepted across all five venues had some form of empirical evaluation. Quantitative evaluation methods were the most frequently reported. Papers most frequently reported results on interventions around pedagogical techniques, curriculum, community, or tools. There was a split in papers that had some type of comparison between an intervention and some other dataset or baseline. Most papers reported related work, following the expectations for doing so in the SIGCSE and CER community. However, many papers were lacking properly reported research objectives, goals, research questions, or hypotheses; description of participants; study design; data collection; and threats to validity. These results align with prior surveys of the CER literature. Conclusions. CER authors are contributing empirical results to the literature; however, not all norms for reporting are met. We encourage authors to provide clear, labeled details about their work so readers can use the study methodologies and results for replications and meta-analyses. As our community grows, our reporting of CER should mature to help establish computing education theory to support the next generation of computing learners.

ITiCSE 2022 preview

The 27th annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) will take place in Dublin, Ireland, hosted by University College Dublin (UCD), with support from the Technological University of Dublin (TU Dublin).

The Past and Future of ITiCSE

The Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) is the second oldest SIGCSE conference, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2020. The conference has had impact beyond its immediate audience, as its organizers have pioneered conference activities that have been adopted by other SIGCSE conferences including working groups and conference-sponsored excursions.

ITiCSE 2017 preview

The 22nd Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2017) is returning to Bologna, Italy. The program of the conference will consist of keynote lectures, paper sessions, panels, working groups, tips and techniques, courseware demonstrations, and posters.

ITiCSE 2016 preview

We are pleased to welcome ITiCSE 2016, the 21st Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, to Peru. The program of the conference will consist of keynote lectures, paper sessions, panels, working groups, tips and techniques, courseware demonstrations, posters, and exhibits.

Understanding Programmers' Brains with fMRI

Event Abstract Back to Event Understanding Programmers' Brains with fMRI Janet Siegmund1*, Christian Kästner2, Sven Apel1, Chris Parnin3, Anja Bethmann4 and Andre Brechmann4 1 University of Passau, Germany 2 Carnegie Mellon University, United States 3 Georgia Institute of Technology, United States 4 Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Germany The human factor plays an important role in software engineering, because humans design, implement, and maintain software. One of the most important cognitive processes is program comprehension, because programmers spend most of their time with understanding source code [3,4,5]. However, despite of more than 30 years of research, we still have no clear understanding of the relevant processes during comprehending source code. To gain a deeper understanding of program comprehension, we measured it by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) [2] since fMRI has proved successful to study comparatively complex cognitive processes in detail. Our hope is that in the process of understanding developer's cognition, we can create a platform for sharing how these complex processes map onto other studies of cognition, and even incorporate ideas for organizing software into models of cognitive processes. In our study, we designed several short source-code snippets and asked computer-science students to determine the output if the source code would be executed (see Fig. 2 or project's website (tinyurl.com/ProgramComprehensionAndfMRI/) for examples). As control condition, we let participants locate syntax errors that did not require understanding the source code (Fig. 3). After testing and refining the source-code snippets in behavioral pilot studies [1], we carried out the measurements with 17 participants on a 3~Tesla scanner. For fMRI, we acquired 985 functional volumes in 32 minutes and 50 seconds using standard echo planar imaging (EPI) sequence with whole brain coverage at an isotropic resolution of 3 mm. Functional data were analyzed in BrainVoyager employing a random effects GLM contrasting the program comprehension condition against the syntax condition. We found Brodmann areas 6, 21, 40, 44, and 47 are activated during program comprehension (Fig. 1). These areas are related to language processing, working memory, and problem solving, which is in line with the current understanding of program comprehension. The results of our study suggest that fMRI is promising to give us a more detailed understanding of program comprehension. Over the next years, we hope that more researchers will adopt our idea. By raising the awareness of how fMRI can be applied to software-engineering research, we also hope that more software engineers will contribute to develop more powerful fMRI paradigms. In the long run, we will gain a better understanding of the neural basis of designing, implementing, and maintaining software, which may in turn help to optimize tools or programming languages. Additionally, our research will have a broad impact on education, so that training beginning programmers can be improved considerably. Despite intensive research (e.g., Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education), it is still rather unclear how and why students struggle with learning programming. With a detailed understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie a developers' every-day task, we might find the right recipe to teach any student to become an excellent software developer (e.g., by including training language skills, since our study showed a close relationship to language processing). As next steps, we will conduct more such experiments. To support replication and help other software-engineering researchers adopt fMRI for their research, we will make all data publicly available. Eventually, we hope to find answers to heatedly discussed questions, such as ``How should we teach programming?'' or ``What makes a programmer excellent?''. Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Acknowledgements Thanks to Thomas Leich and Gunter Saake for fruitful discussions.

Multifarious initiatives in cybersecurity education

According to the nAtionAl Security council, “president obama has identified cybersecurity as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counter [2].” in may of 2009, the president supported the recommendations from his commissioned cyberspace policy review that, among other endorsements, included promoting cybersecurity awareness and building the digital workforce of the 21st century. the recommendations from the cyberspace policy review were based upon the 2008 comprehensive National cybersecurity initiative (cNci), which consists of 12 individual initiatives designed to help secure the united States in cyberspace. this column will focus on initiative 8 – expand cyber education – as it relates to two-year college programs. First a little background on cNci initiative 8. presently, an insufficient number of cybersecurity practitioners and professionals exist to protect and defend the united States in cyberspace. the current cybersecurity training and education programs are limited in focus and lack unity of effort. Evolving from cNci initiative 8, the National initiative for cybersecurity Education (NicE) was established with the goal of creating “operational, sustainable and continually improving” cybersecurity education that will enhance the nation’s security [8]. the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are serving as co-leads for this NicE component called Formal Cybersecurity Education. the mission of this component is to bolster cybersecurity education programs from kindergarten through graduate school, with an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (StEm) disciplines to fill the pipeline with technologicallyskilled and cyber-savvy personnel. During the summer of 2011, an acm innovation and technology in computer Science Education (iticSE) working group studied 16 associate-degree programs in information assurance (a.k.a. cybersecurity). the findings are revealing and in concert with cNci initiative 8. “a lack of consensus of what constitutes information assurance (ia) education has led to ia degree programs with widely varying curricula [10].” associate degree ia programs vary in their particular emphases, their curricular structure, and whether they are meant to place graduates into the workforce or to matriculate students into baccalaureate degree programs. of the 16 associate-degree programs examined by the 2011 working group, 14 were associate of applied Science (a.a.S.) degrees and 2 were associate of Science (a.S.) degrees. of the a.a.S. career programs, two areas of concentration emerged, network security and computer forensics. Figure 1 depicts the composition of a typical network security degree, while Figure 2 illustrates the composition of a typical computer forensics

ITiCSE 2012

The 17th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2012) took place in Haifa, Israel on June 3-5. ITiCSE 2012 was among the official Centenary events of the Alan Turing Year and all three keynotes were related to the Turing Centenary.

High School Students Learning University Level Computer Science on the Web – a Case Study of the DASK-Model

Background Today's society requires citizens to have a greater knowledge of information technology. Strategy programs at a national level define the skills needed in an information society and encourage people to learn these skills (Ministry of Education, 2004). In order for everybody to have the opportunity to learn the basics of the new technology, computer science (CS) should be included in general education. The Finnish Educational System In the Finnish educational system, high schools (HSs) are referred to as upper secondary schools. The principal objective of these schools is to provide aged 16-19 with general, all-round education preparing them for further studies and life in general. According to Ben-Ari (2004), a science can be taught at lower levels when it matures. CS has traditionally been taught mainly at university level, but Ben-Ari argues that the time has come for it to be introduced at lower levels of education as well. For instance, in the USA (Merritt et al., 1993) and in Israel (Gal-Ezer, Beeri, Harel, & Yehudai, 1995), CS curricula for HSs were developed in the 1990s. In Finland, the situation seems to be going in the opposite direction: CS is not part of the HS core curriculum (National Board of Education, 2003). CS has thus a completely different position than other sciences, such as mathematics and physics, which are compulsory at secondary level. Considering (1) the objective of HSs, (2) Ben-Ari's vision and (3) Finland being one of the leading nations in the field of information technology, it can be seen as something of a paradox that CS is not included in the core curriculum of HSs; institutions that should provide all-round learning are not obliged to provide their with tuition in perhaps one of the most important subject areas today. Implications of the Lack of CS in High Schools When there are no formal requirements for instruction in CS, many HSs are not likely to expand the range of courses to include genuine CS courses; in the worst case, they will arrange no CS-related courses at all. If CS-related courses are taught at all, they are largely practical, aimed at teaching the how to use the computer and various software packages. The essential skills needed by all citizens in everyday life, such as algorithmic and logical thinking skills, are not developed when simply using the computer as a tool. Moreover, misconceptions of CS as focusing on computer hardware are reinforced when instruction is concentrated on purely technical and practical aspects. This has implications both for the general public and for future computer scientists; in particular, female may be intimidated by the stereotypical, nevertheless common, view of CS represented by a young male hacker sitting in front of his computer drinking soft drinks and eating pizza (Martin, 2004). These misconceptions may also result in enrolling in CS courses on the misconception that they will be of a practical nature, being unaware of the distinction between computer literacy and During ITiCSE 2003 (Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education--an international conference for researchers and practitioners in the field of CS education), a working group convened around the topic Preparing for university study in CS. Among other things, it analyzed the performance of CS in different countries during their first years at university (Alexander et al., 2003). One conclusion was that do not know what to expect when enrolling for studies in CS: students who join a degree programme on the basis of experience in using PCs and games consoles are likely to face something of a culture shock (p.144). Furthermore, researchers have studied factors predicting success in university CS, and many of them have found that pre-university CS courses increase the chance of succeeding at university level (Alexander et al. …