Improving Introductory Computer Science Education with DRaCO

Today, many introductory computer science courses rely heavily on a specific programming language to convey fundamental programming concepts. For beginning students, the cognitive capacity required to operate with the syntactic forms of this language may overwhelm their ability to formulate a solution to a program. We recognize that the introductory computer science courses can be more effective if they convey fundamental concepts without requiring the students to focus on the syntax of a programming language. To achieve this, we propose a new teaching method based on the Design Recipe and Code Outlining (DRaCO) processes. Our new pedagogy capitalizes on the algorithmic intuitions of novice students and provides a tool for students to externalize their intuitions using techniques they are already familiar with, rather than with the syntax of a specific programming language. We validate the effectiveness of our new pedagogy by integrating it into an existing CS1 course at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. We find that the our newly proposed pedagogy shows strong potential to improve students’ ability to program

The Autograder project: improving software engineering skills through automated feedback on programming exercises

Master's thesis in Computer scienceMany students find it difficult to learn programming skills. One reason for this difficulty is that feedback from teaching staff is often slow. The Autograder aims to improve student learning through rapid feedback and to stimulate self-learning. The Autograder project provides a web-frontend and a server back-end that has been developed for automatically correcting and evaluating solutions to programming exercises submitted by students. Correcting and evaluating student submissions are based on teacher written test cases, which the submitted solutions should pass. From this the students get rapid feedback and a score on the programming assignments. Autograder depends on a custom built continuous integration service, test-driven development and a version control system to deliver its services. The Autograder has been successfully used in a master-level course at the University in Stavanger. Students and teaching staff was monitored and interviewed through their assignment work. Autograder provided an efficient way for the students to reach their potential, through rapid feedback on submitted exercises. The teaching staff got a better overview of the students progress, which made it easier to follow up each student. They was relieved from the burden of manually correcting assignments and could more easily identify pain points in the exercises. Together with oral examination in the lab, the test results obtained through the Autograder was used as the basis for grading the lab assignments. The lab submissions made it much easier for the teaching staff to prepare for the oral examination. Although we cannot draw strong conclusions at this point in time, we have some data points that seem to indicate that student learning has improved also on the final written exam

Long-Term Outcomes of Early Adult 4-H Alumni

Very little has been published reporting on long-term outcomes experienced by young adults (aged 19 to 34 years old) who participated in 4-H youth development programs. We adopted Gambone et al.’s (2002) framework advancing three long-term outcomes for early adulthood: economic stability, health and well-being, and community involvement. With cross-sectional survey methods, we compared long-term impacts between 693 California 4-H young adult alumni and 373 young adults in a U.S. general population sample who had not participated in 4-H. The results demonstrated that 4-H alumni report more positive long-term outcomes than the U.S. general population sample. The study contributes to the dearth of research around long-term outcomes, may be useful for marketing and funding, and will help better understanding the public value of Extension

Change That Abides: A Retrospective Look at Five Community and Family Stengthening Projects and Their Enduring Results

Examines the interactions among funders, grantees, and community groups, and outlines the results of three different types of foundation grants for projects in Savannah, Little Rock, Dayton, Alameda County, and Boston. Includes recommendations

CIS: A Web-Based Course Information System

This report surveys the design and implementation of CIS, a web-based Course Information System. CIS has been developed for the Computer Science I/II courses held between 2000 and 2003 by Prof. Dr. R. Loos, which were attended by 300 to 450 students. It maintains and presents each student's submissions and grades and holds related information such as worksheet texts, submission deadlines and the assignment of students to teaching assistents. In short, it covers most of the administrative data that comes up in regular university courses. CIS is designed to be used by first-year students conveniently. It aims at modelling real-world procedures, so that the system behaviour can be explained in well-known analogies. It is minimalistic, in the sense that it only takes on the routine work, while leaving the teacher free in any questions of structuring the contents of the course. Our problem statement and analysis focuses to two aspects: The requirements on the central data base and the interfaces for three groups of users: Students, teaching assistants, and teachers/adminis-trators. The actual implementation is straightforward, and we only mention particular decisions taken herein. CIS has been in use at the Wilhelm-Schickard Institut for three years, in courses organized both by the authors and others. The experiences indicate that the system can be considered reliable and mature. As the effort of setting up CIS is small, it has become feasible to employ it for several advanced courses with fewer than 20 students

Print- Jul. 22, 1971

https://neiudc.neiu.edu/print/1206/thumbnail.jp

Understanding hunter-wild pig (Sus scrofa) interactions in the United States: a mixed-methods research approach to inform invasive species management

2020 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

Generative Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering -- A Research Agenda

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools have become increasingly prevalent in software development, offering assistance to various managerial and technical project activities. Notable examples of these tools include OpenAIs ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Amazon CodeWhisperer. Although many recent publications have explored and evaluated the application of GenAI, a comprehensive understanding of the current development, applications, limitations, and open challenges remains unclear to many. Particularly, we do not have an overall picture of the current state of GenAI technology in practical software engineering usage scenarios. We conducted a literature review and focus groups for a duration of five months to develop a research agenda on GenAI for Software Engineering. We identified 78 open Research Questions (RQs) in 11 areas of Software Engineering. Our results show that it is possible to explore the adoption of GenAI in partial automation and support decision-making in all software development activities. While the current literature is skewed toward software implementation, quality assurance and software maintenance, other areas, such as requirements engineering, software design, and software engineering education, would need further research attention. Common considerations when implementing GenAI include industry-level assessment, dependability and accuracy, data accessibility, transparency, and sustainability aspects associated with the technology. GenAI is bringing significant changes to the field of software engineering. Nevertheless, the state of research on the topic still remains immature. We believe that this research agenda holds significance and practical value for informing both researchers and practitioners about current applications and guiding future research