Games, Robots, and Robot Games: Complementary Contexts for Introductory Computing Education

Using games to teach introductory computing courses provides another context with which to exploring the possible attraction, retention, and education of a new generation of computer science (CS) students. At Bryn Mawr College, we have been actively exploring these contexts and have identified four that have great promise for use in teaching introductory computing courses: visualization, multimedia, robotics, and, most recently, games. We are currently using and analysing robots and have some preliminary results. We believe that much of what we have learned in using robots in the classroom can be applied to the other contexts, especially gaming. In addition, many aspects of gaming can also be used in an introductory course using robots. This paper will explore robotics, gaming, their interactions, and provide suggestions on how best to proceed in making the most out of games in the classroom

Annual Report 2020-2021

LETTER FROM THE DEAN As I write this letter during the beginning of the 2021–22 academic year, we have started to welcome the majority of our students to campus— many for the very first time, and some for the first time in a year and a half. It has been wonderful to be together, in-person, again. Four quarters of learning and working remotely was challenging, to be sure, but I have been consistently amazed by the resilience, innovation, and hard work of our students, faculty, and staff, even in the most difficult of circumstances. This annual report, covering the 2020–21 academic year—one that was entirely virtual—highlights many of those examples: from a second place national ranking by our Security Daemons team to hosting a blockbuster virtual screenwriting conference with top talent; from gaming grants helping us reach historically excluded youth to alumni successes across our three schools. Recently, I announced that, after 40 years at DePaul and 15 years as the Dean of CDM, I will be stepping down from the deanship at the end of the 2021–22 academic year. I began my tenure at DePaul in 1981 as an assistant professor, with the founding of the Department of Computer Science, joining seven faculty members who were leaving the mathematics department for this new venture. It has been amazing to watch our college grow during that time. We now have more than 40 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, over 22,000 college alumni, and a catalog of nationally ranked programs. And we plan to keep going. If there is anything I’ve learned at CDM, it’s that a lot can be accomplished in a year (as this report shows), and I’m committed to working hard and continuing the progress we’ve made together in 2021–22. David MillerDeanhttps://via.library.depaul.edu/cdmannual/1004/thumbnail.jp

Assessing the quality of a student-generated question repository

We present results from a study that categorizes and assesses the quality of questions and explanations authored by students, in question repositories produced as part of the summative assessment in introductory physics courses over the past two years. Mapping question quality onto the levels in the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy, we find that students produce questions of high quality. More than three-quarters of questions fall into categories beyond simple recall, in contrast to similar studies of student-authored content in different subject domains. Similarly, the quality of student-authored explanations for questions was also high, with approximately 60% of all explanations classified as being of high or outstanding quality. Overall, 75% of questions met combined quality criteria, which we hypothesize is due in part to the in-class scaffolding activities that we provided for students ahead of requiring them to author questions.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

STEM Community Chairs Progress Updates Spring 2016

The following is a brief update of the activities and efforts being undertaken by UNO’s Dr. George and Sally Haddix Community Chair of STEM Education as being held by Dr. Neal Grandgenett. The goal of this position is: Position Goal: To organize, lead and inspire collaborative STEM initiatives at UNO, that cross colleges and disciplines, and that aggressively position UNO to be a true national leader in interdisciplinary STEM programs. (Curriculum, Capacity, Collaboration

The Design of an Emerging/Multi-Paradigm Programming Languages Course

We present the design of a new special topics course, Emerging/Multi-paradigm Languages, on the recent trend toward more dynamic, multi-paradigm languages. To foster course adoption, we discuss the design of the course, which includes language presentations/papers and culminating, inal projects/papers. The goal of this article is to inspire and facilitate course adoption

Mission (im-)possible? Increasing the participation of female students in university computing courses

In 1990 the Australian Federal government set a target for a 40% enrolment rate of females in all non-traditional areas of study including computer science. In view of this target, the low enrolment of females in computer science at Victoria University is a persisting concern: enrolment rates have continued to decline from 30% in the early 1990s to less than 20% in recent years, despite significant attempts to arrest the decline by introducing annual student recruitment events such as school visits, career nights, and University Open Days. This suggested that the issue of encouraging females to study computing needed to focus more directly on factors deterring females from pursuing computing courses. Misperceptions about the nature of computing studies have long been regarded as such a factor. Accordingly, last year a different initiative was launched. Focusing on girls from the neighbouring high schools, it aimed to dispel the misperceptions, and encourage girls to pursue computing studies, by demonstrating how interesting, easy, and female-friendly computing is at Victoria University. The girls were invited to spend a day in the shoes of a computing student at the University by participating in specially designed classroom activities, interacting with female university students, and lunching at the student cafeteria. While the event proved a winner on the day, it remains to be seen if it will translate into improved female enrolments in the future. However, the effort involved in organising the event and the difficulties encountered in the process revealed the extent and complexity of the struggle for increased participation of females in computing studies. The following questions arose: Who is interested in pursuing the cause? Who is prepared to support it? What would it take to make a change? This paper reflects on these issues