Novice Learner Experiences in Software Development: A Study of Freshman Undergraduates

This paper presents a study that is part of a larger research project aimed at addressing the gap in the provision of educational software development processes for freshman, novice undergraduate learners, to improve proficiency levels. With the aim of understanding how such learners problem solve in software development in the absence of a formal process, this case study examines the experiences and depth of learning acquired by a sample set of novice undergraduates. A novel adaption of the Kirkpatrick framework known as AKM-SOLO is used to frame the evaluation. The study finds that without the scaffolding of an appropriate structured development process tailored to novices, students are in danger of failing to engage with the problem solving skills necessary for software development, particularly the skill of designing solutions prior to coding. It also finds that this lack of engagement directly impacts their affective state on the course and continues to negatively impact their proficiency and affective state in the second year of their studies leading to just under half of students surveyed being unsure if they wish to pursue a career in software development when they graduate

Opening the Door of the Computer Science Classroom: The Disciplinary Commons

... document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in Computer Science (CS) classrooms, and to establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators. The mechanism for achieving these goals was through a series of monthly meetings involving Computer Science faculty, one cohort of ten CS faculty in the US and one cohort of twenty in the UK. Meetings were focused on the teaching and learning within participants’ classrooms, with each person documenting their teaching in a course portfolio. Surveyed on completing the project, participants discussed the value of the Disciplinary Commons in providing the time and structure to systematically reflect upon their practice, to exchange concrete ideas for teaching their courses with other CS educators in the discipline, to learn skills that apply directly to course and program evaluation, and to meet colleagues teaching CS at other institutions

Poor Poor Dumb Mouths, and Bid Them Speak for Me: Theorizing the Use of Personas in Practice

Although personas are commonly used to represent users in design, their rhetorical function has been little explored. In this article, the authors theorize personas’ rhetorical function as ventriloquization, where one person speaks with the voice of another. In ventriloquizing users through personas, practitioners speak for users, while scripting personas to speak for their creators: each magnifies the others’ voice. Personas represent a strategic rhetorical gambit for gaining legitimacy within organizations and technological decision-making processes

Social Genesis in Computing Education

It is common to think of learning as the acquisition of knowledge by an individual learner. Starting a century ago, Lev Vygotsky developed a different perspective on learning, initiating a tradition of educational research whose momentum and influence continue to grow. One of Vygotsky\u27s key principles is the general genetic law of cultural development that states that whatever skilled cognition that individuals carry out within their own minds is preceded by homologous activity carried out by a social group of which this individual was a part. In linking the individual and society through this law, learning is not simply a matter of the acquisition of domain knowledge. Rather, it is a cyclic process by which a social group, in its functioning through joint activity, leads to individuals taking into themselves (i.e., internalizing) the social forms of activity. In this article, our goal is to explicate Vygotsky\u27s genetic law and demonstrate its utility for yielding novel insight into computing education. We provide an extended illustration of the use of Vygotsky\u27s law in examining a teacher and students in a university setting write code together during a class session. What our analysis reveals is that the teacher and students together enact a sequential, rule-based, and dialogical process of problem decomposition and code writing far different from the plan and schema-based models for programming that have emerged from prior research focused on the individual student and their cognitive strategies and structures. We provide commentary on implications of the genetic law for both research and practice in computing education

UX as Disruption: Managing Team Conflict as a Productive Resource

UX as Disruption: Managing Team Conflict as a Productive Resource: 10.4018/IJSKD.2015070101: Over the past 30 years, there has been an ongoing shift in software from a system-centered to user-centered approach. When user-centered approaches ar

UX as Disruption: Managing Team Conflict as a Productive Resource

UX as Disruption: Managing Team Conflict as a Productive Resource: 10.4018/IJSKD.2015070101: Over the past 30 years, there has been an ongoing shift in software from a system-centered to user-centered approach. When user-centered approaches ar

Seeing Design Stances

In this paper, we investigate the stances that designers take in relation to one another in design critiques. Analysis of audiovisual recordings of critiques between students and professional designers in industrial design in the DTRS 10 data-set reveals that design concepts not only are verbally narrated but also come to life in gesture, gaze, orientation and body movement. In these bodily performances, participants adopt and shift between several identified stances, which we call inscriptional, third-person, first-person and phenomenal. In social relations, these stances are mirrored, taken up, responded to and elaborated by the other participants. The critique itself, then, can be seen as a dialogical movement by the participating designers through a set of stances. By comparing a case in which participants are collocated to a case in which the participants are at a geographic distance facilitated only by real-time audio and shared computer display, we conjecture that this responsive mirroring and elaboration of stance can be hindered when participants do not have visual access to one another and thus increase the chances of communication breakdowns. å© 2016 Taylor & Francis

From I-Awareness to We-Awareness in CSCW

Awareness is one of the central concepts in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, though it has often been used in several different senses. Recently, researchers have begun to provide a clearer conceptualization of awareness that provides concrete guidance for the structuring of empirical studies of awareness and the development of tools to support awareness. Such conceptions, however, do not take into account newer understandings of shared intentionality among cooperating actors that recently have been defined by philosophers and empirically investigated by psychologists and psycho-linguists. These newer conceptions highlight the common ground and socially recursive inference that underwrites cooperative behavior. And it is this inference that is often seamlessly carried out in collocated work, so easy to take for granted and hence overlook, that will require computer support if such work is to be partially automated or carried out at a distance. Ignoring the inferences required in achieving common ground may thus focus a researcher or designer on surface forms of \u27heeding\u27 that miss the underlying processes of intention shared in and through activity that are critical for cooperation to succeed. Shared intentionality thus provides a basis for reconceptualizing awareness in CSCW research, building on and augmenting existing notions. In this paper, we provide a philosophically grounded conception of awareness based on shared intentionality, demonstrate how it accounts for behavior in an empirical study of two individuals in collocated, tightly-coupled work, and provide implications of this conception for the design of computational systems to support tightly-coupled collaborative work. å© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht