Helping Data Science Students Develop Task Modularity

This paper explores the skills needed to be a data scientist. Specifically, we report on a mixed method study of a project-based data science class, where we evaluated student effectiveness with respect to dividing a project into appropriately sized modular tasks, which we termed task modularity. Our results suggest that while data science students can appreciate the value of task modularity, they struggle to achieve effective task modularity. As a first step, based our study, we identified six task decomposition best practices. However, these best practices do not fully address this gap of how to enable data science students to effectively use task modularity. We note that while computer science/information system programs typically teach modularity (e.g., the decomposition process and abstraction), and there remains a need identify a corresponding model to that used for computer science / information system students, to teach modularity to data science students

Impact in networks and ecosystems: building case studies that make a difference

open accessThis toolkit aims to support the building up of case studies that show the impact of project activities aiming to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. The case studies respond to the challenge of understanding what kinds of interventions work in the Southern African region, where, and why. The toolkit has a specific focus on entrepreneurial ecosystems and proposes a method of mapping out the actors and their relationships over time. The aim is to understand the changes that take place in the ecosystems. These changes are seen to be indicators of impact as increased connectivity and activity in ecosystems are key enablers of innovation. Innovations usually happen together with matching social and institutional adjustments, facilitating the translation of inventions into new or improved products and services. Similarly, the processes supporting entrepreneurship are guided by policies implemented in the common framework provided by innovation systems. Overall, policies related to systems of innovation are by nature networking policies applied throughout the socioeconomic framework of society to pool scarce resources and make various sectors work in coordination with each other. Most participating SAIS countries already have some kinds of identifiable systems of innovation in place both on national and regional levels, but the lack of appropriate institutions, policies, financial instruments, human resources, and support systems, together with underdeveloped markets, create inefficiencies and gaps in systemic cooperation and collaboration. In other words, we do not always know what works and what does not. On another level, engaging users and intermediaries at the local level and driving the development of local innovation ecosystems within which local culture, especially in urban settings, has evident impact on how collaboration and competition is both seen and done. In this complex environment, organisations supporting entrepreneurship and innovation often find it difficult to create or apply relevant knowledge and appropriate networking tools, approaches, and methods needed to put their processes to work for broader developmental goals. To further enable these organisations’ work, it is necessary to understand what works and why in a given environment. Enhanced local and regional cooperation promoted by SAIS Innovation Fund projects can generate new data on this little-explored area in Southern Africa. Data-driven knowledge on entrepreneurship and innovation support best practices as well as effective and efficient management of entrepreneurial ecosystems can support replication and inform policymaking, leading thus to a wider impact than just that of the immediate reported projects and initiatives

Teaching programming at a distance: the Internet software visualization laboratory

This paper describes recent developments in our approach to teaching computer programming in the context of a part-time Masters course taught at a distance. Within our course, students are sent a pack which contains integrated text, software and video course material, using a uniform graphical representation to tell a consistent story of how the programming language works. The students communicate with their tutors over the phone and through surface mail. Through our empirical studies and experience teaching the course we have identified four current problems: (i) students' difficulty mapping between the graphical representations used in the course and the programs to which they relate, (ii) the lack of a conversational context for tutor help provided over the telephone, (iii) helping students who due to their other commitments tend to study at 'unsociable' hours, and (iv) providing software for the constantly changing and expanding range of platforms and operating systems used by students. We hope to alleviate these problems through our Internet Software Visualization Laboratory (ISVL), which supports individual exploration, and both synchronous and asynchronous communication. As a single user, students are aided by the extra mappings provided between the graphical representations used in the course and their computer programs, overcoming the problems of the original notation. ISVL can also be used as a synchronous communication medium whereby one of the users (generally the tutor) can provide an annotated demonstration of a program and its execution, a far richer alternative to technical discussions over the telephone. Finally, ISVL can be used to support asynchronous communication, helping students who work at unsociable hours by allowing the tutor to prepare short educational movies for them to view when convenient. The ISVL environment runs on a conventional web browser and is therefore platform independent, has modest hardware and bandwidth requirements, and is easy to distribute and maintain. Our planned experiments with ISVL will allow us to investigate ways in which new technology can be most appropriately applied in the service of distance education

Procedure-modular specification and verification of temporal safety properties

This paper describes ProMoVer, a tool for fully automated procedure-modular verification of Java programs equipped with method-local and global assertions that specify safety properties of sequences of method invocations. Modularity at the procedure-level is a natural instantiation of the modular verification paradigm, where correctness of global properties is relativized on the local properties of the methods rather than on their implementations. Here, it is based on the construction of maximal models for a program model that abstracts away from program data. This approach allows global properties to be verified in the presence of code evolution, multiple method implementations (as arising from software product lines), or even unknown method implementations (as in mobile code for open platforms). ProMoVer automates a typical verification scenario for a previously developed tool set for compositional verification of control flow safety properties, and provides appropriate pre- and post-processing. Both linear-time temporal logic and finite automata are supported as formalisms for expressing local and global safety properties, allowing the user to choose a suitable format for the property at hand. Modularity is exploited by a mechanism for proof reuse that detects and minimizes the verification tasks resulting from changes in the code and the specifications. The verification task is relatively light-weight due to support for abstraction from private methods and automatic extraction of candidate specifications from method implementations. We evaluate the tool on a number of applications from the domains of Java Card and web-based application

Conceptualizing and investigating mathematics teacher learning of practice

Researchers and teacher educators have made advances in describing mathematics instruction that can support all students in developing conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, and productive dispositions toward mathematics. Some scholars have described teaching toward these goals as ambitious teaching – teaching that attends and responds to all students as they engage in intellectually rigorous mathematical activity. To further specify this broad vision, core practices of ambitious teaching are being unpacked and identified so that teachers can learn to enact these practice to support student learning. To support teacher learning, teacher educators have increasingly engaged prospective teachers in rehearsing core practices in less complex settings to learn the skills and purpose for enacting these practices. Emerging research on rehearsals has demonstrated its value in aiding prospective teachers in beginning to enact ambitious teaching practices prior to entering the profession. While interest in a core practice approach to teaching and teacher learning has grown, scholars have noted that a shared conceptual model of practice might further the field in making progress in accumulating knowledge and building theory of teacher learning of practice. Additionally, others posit that a core practice approach may also support teachers in professional development, yet to this point there has been little conceptual and empirical efforts attending to teacher learning of core practices. This study addresses these gaps in the literature by investigating a conceptual model of teaching and a teacher educator pedagogy, rehearsal, to advance efforts promoting mathematics teacher learning of ambitious teaching. Three manuscripts collectively illustrate progress on these ideas, drawing upon data and analyses from two years of research in a practice-based professional development for secondary mathematics teachers. The first manuscript develops and investigates a conceptual model of teaching to improve design and research efforts for teacher learning of ambitious teaching. This conceptual paper addresses a set of design considerations and learning tensions inherent in a core practice approach and examines hierarchical modularity as a way to conceptualize teaching to reconcile these challenges. The second manuscript brings together this conceptual model with a social theory of learning and reports on a retrospective analysis of four teachers’ attempts to enact core practices in their classrooms to explore the ways teachers recompose practices over time toward more ambitious forms of teaching. Findings from an analysis of 5,300 instructional moves teachers used over 20 lessons, highlight that small changes in teachers’ use of instructional moves that press students to justify their reasoning and orient students to one another’s mathematical ideas, supported corresponding changes in teachers’ enactments of larger practices of teaching. The third manuscript describes a design for rehearsals for teacher learning of core practices in professional development. It details our design process, describes the ways teachers engaged in rehearsals, and offers evidence of how two teachers engagement in rehearsals corresponded to changes in their classroom practices. The conceptual arguments in the first manuscript furthers the fields efforts to conceptualize practice to explore teacher learning using a core practice approach. The empirical analysis in the second manuscript provides new ways to explore how learning can be evidenced and investigated across teachers enactments of core practices in their teaching. The design of rehearsals discussed in the third manuscript provides the field with ways to envision and repurpose pedagogies of practice from teacher development to support teacher learning of ambitious teaching. Together, the three manuscripts identify areas for continued inquiry and effort for the design and implementation of practice-based professional development and research on teacher learning of practice

MiniCERNBot Educational Platform: Antimatter Factory Mock-up Missions for Problem-Solving STEM Learning

Mechatronics and robotics appeared particularly effective in students’ education, allowing them to create non-traditional solutions in STEM disciplines, which have a direct impact and interaction with the world surrounding them. This paper presents the current state of the MiniCERNBot Educational Robotic platform for high-school and university students. The robot provides a comprehensive educative system with tutorials and tasks tuned for different ages on 3D design, mechanical assembly, control, programming, planning, and operation. The system is inspired to existing robotic systems and typical robotic interventions performed at CERN, and includes an education mock-up that follows the example of a previous real operation performed in CERN’s Antimatter Factory. The paper describes the learning paths where the MiniCERNBot platform can be used by students, at different ages and disciplines. In addition, it describes the software and hardware architecture, presenting results on modularity and network performance during education exercises. In summary, the objective of the study is improving the way STEM educational and dissemination activities at CERN Robotics Lab are performed, as well as their possible synergies with other education institutions, such as High-Schools and Universities, improving the learning collaborative process and inspiring students interested in technical studies. To this end, a new educational robotic platform has been designed, inspired on real scientific operations, which allows the students practice multidisciplinary STEM skills in a collaborative problem-solving way, while increasing their motivation and comprehension of the research activities

Using Social Network Analysis to Explore Digital Student Interactions and Business Competency Learning in a Web-based Educational Platform:

Web 2.0 tools occupy a large part of our lives, and their use in the classroom offers instructors a unique opportunity to gather substantial information about individual and interactive student behaviors. The authors’ challenge is understanding the implications of this rich data source for assessing course efficacy and student learning, and applying these insights to further enhance the development of global business competencies. This paper reviews 311 student interactions as reflected in comments exchanged in a digital social learning community and, using social network analysis, discusses the potential to use these interactions to assess student critical thinking, communication, and collaborative feedback skills. The authors conclude with implications and recommendations for instructors who want to use Web 2.0 platforms and data to enhance their understanding of student and class digital interactions, and apply this information to course enhancement