A National Mentoring and Buddying Pilot Scheme for UK Early Career CS Academics

In the United Kingdom (UK), a thriving computer science education (CSE) community of practice is evolving, supported by national and international professional body/learned society specialist interest groups, and being developed through a number of CSE research and practice conferences. A key group within this emerging community of practice are early career academics who are required to overcoming significant obstacles in the early stages of their academic career, from developing an independent research career, delivering high quality learning and teaching, continuing their own professional development, alongside wider academic service commitments. Institutional-level, but generally subject-agnostic, support for early career colleagues in the UK is supplemented by nationwide developmental sessions and initiatives such as journal clubs. This poster reports on a pilot scheme to support early career CS academics through a mentoring scheme consisting of cross-institutional mentoring from experienced academics as well as buddying groups of similar career stage colleagues

Up close and pedagogical: Computing academics talk about teaching

This paper describes and enacts a process for bootstrapping a more systematic discussion of computing education within a school of computing at a researchintensive Australasian university. Thus far, the project has gone through three stages. In the first stage, some academics were interviewed about their approach to teaching. In the second stage, selected anonymous quotes from the interviews were presented and discussed by other interested members of the school at workshops. In the final stage, selected anonymous quotes from the interviews and workshops were placed on a web-based survey, to which interested members of the school responded. These forms of data will be used to drive further stages of debate within the school. The theoretical underpinnings of this project are Wenger's concept of a community of practice, phenomenography, and socially constructivism. The aim is not to instruct the academics in any "right way" to teach. Instead, the aim is to facilitate debate, where the teachers identify the problems, and in finding the solutions they construct their own "pedagogic reality". As facilitators of this process, the authors of this paper highlighted dialectically opposed views in quotes from the teachers, and then allow the teachers to synthesise those views into a more sophisticated view. Our ultimate project aim is to grow a teaching community that balances reified theories of teaching and learning with participation in a community of practice. © 2006, Australian Computer Society, Inc

Authentication of Students and Students’ Work in E-Learning : Report for the Development Bid of Academic Year 2010/11

Global e-learning market is projected to reach $107.3 billion by 2015 according to a new report by The Global Industry Analyst (Analyst 2010). The popularity and growth of the online programmes within the School of Computer Science obviously is in line with this projection. However, also on the rise are students’ dishonesty and cheating in the open and virtual environment of e-learning courses (Shepherd 2008). Institutions offering e-learning programmes are facing the challenges of deterring and detecting these misbehaviours by introducing security mechanisms to the current e-learning platforms. In particular, authenticating that a registered student indeed takes an online assessment, e.g., an exam or a coursework, is essential for the institutions to give the credit to the correct candidate. Authenticating a student is to ensure that a student is indeed who he says he is. Authenticating a student’s work goes one step further to ensure that an authenticated student indeed does the submitted work himself. This report is to investigate and compare current possible techniques and solutions for authenticating distance learning student and/or their work remotely for the elearning programmes. The report also aims to recommend some solutions that fit with UH StudyNet platform.Submitted Versio

INFLUENCING THE FUTURE: ADOLESCENT GIRLS’ PERCEPTIONS OF CYBERSECURITY CAREERS

Adolescents are influenced in multiple ways and through multiple channels. Influencers strongly affect adolescent’s decision-making related to activities, classes, and career choices. Middle school is a key time when girls tend to explore or turn away from cyber fields. Through qualitative survey research with open coding data analysis, this research answers the question “What are the adolescent girls’ influencers as related to exploration of the cybersecurity field? by presenting the SCCIF Model. The factors of influence discovered are school, community/groups, career perception, individual, and family which transition through positive, negative, or neutral stages, and can move fluidly between them

Comparing importance of knowledge and professional skill areas for engineering programming utilizing a two group Delphi survey

All engineering careers require some level of programming proficiency. However, beginning programming classes are challenging for many students. Difficulties have been well-documented and contribute to high drop-out rates which prevent students from pursuing engineering. While many approaches have been tried to improve the performance of students and reduce the dropout rate, continued work is needed. This research seeks to re-examine what items are critical for programming education and how those might inform what is taught in introductory programming classes (CS1). Following trends coming from accreditation and academic boards on the importance of professional skills, we desire to rank knowledge and professional skill areas in one list. While programming curricula focus almost exclusively on knowledge areas, integrating critical professional skill areas could provide students with a better high-level understanding of what engineering encompasses. Enhancing the current knowledge centric syllabi with critical professional skills should allow students to have better visibility into what an engineering job might be like at the earliest classes in the engineering degree. To define our list of important professional skills, we use a two-group, three-round Delphi survey to build consensus ranked lists of knowledge and professional skill areas from industry and academic experts. Performing a gap analysis between the expert groups shows that industry experts focus more on professional skills then their academic counterparts. We use this resulting list to recommend ways to further integrate professional skills into engineering programming curriculum

Experiential Learning Framework for Smaller Computer Science Programs

Experiential learning (EL) permeates the Computer Science discipline. This work seeks to codify EL practices for computer science pedagogy into ve key pillars. These pillars have been successfully applied at a small to mid-sized college within the heavily competitive Boston area. This paper further describes how a computer science department may eectively implement the pillars in their own curriculum

Computer Science Educators’ Use of Twitter for Conference Engagements: A Grounded Theory Analysis

This study explored how computer science education community used Twitter as a conference backchannel. Using Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology, four themes and ten categories emerged. These themes are: Promote Scholarship; Connect, Promote and Extend the Research Community; Engage in Professional Learning; Humanise the Conference Space. Participants using the conference backchannel contributed to the scholarly discourse, extended the reach of the conferences they attended. They benefitted from various discourses, gained publicity, engaged in networking opportunities, enhanced their own professional learning while extending care for other participants. The findings of this study have implications for the computer science education research community. The study provides insights to organisers on how to extend and enhance conference experiences. For researchers, attendees and users of research output, the study demonstrates tangible benefits of connecting, networking and professional learning. For those responsible for assessing researchers’ contribution to scholarship, this study highlights researchers’ engagement in public scholarship. Opportunities for future research are identified

Understanding and Improving the Culture of Hackathons: Think Global Hack Local

Hackathons bring developers, artists and designers together around a shared challenge: ideate, plan and create an application in a highly constrained time frame. A way to socialize, solve problems, and strengthen soft and hard skills, hackathons have grown tremendously in popularity in the last half decade. Despite this growth, it has been noted that females do not participate in hackathons with the same frequency as males. Some theorize that the hackathon culture is intimidating, does not appeal to women, or that it acts to amplify pre-existing cultural biases in computing. In this paper we introduce an alternative format for hackathons to address these issues. Think Global Hack Local (TGHL) is a non-competitive, community-based hackathon that connects non-profit organizations with student developers. Students donate a weekend to solve problems that these organizations otherwise lack the resources to solve. To date, there have been two TGHL hackathons, and we have observed many interesting divergences within the culture of TGHL in comparison to other hackathons. Response has been positive, and nearly all of them indicate that they would do it again. By adopting some of these ideas, we believe that hackathons can become an environment that is more inclusive and fun for all