Introducing Accessibility Requirements Through External Stakeholder Utilization in an Undergraduate Requirements Engineering Course

Undergraduate software engineering courses aim to prepare students to deliver software in a variety of domains. The manner in which these courses are conducted varies, though team projects with real or imaginary stakeholders are common. While the key course concepts vary from the entire lifecycle to specific aspects of design, concepts like accessibility are rare. This paper will present a study of team projects in a requirements engineering course. One group of students conducted projects with accessibility requirements while another group of students delivered projects without accessibility requirements. The course content was the same, including discussion of accessibility. To support the understanding of accessibility, stakeholders with disabilities were included in the requirements engineering process. Both teams benefited from the experience as indirect knowledge acquisition occurred. Students from a previous offering of the course, with no external stakeholder interaction, demonstrated lower levels of accessibility understanding

Ethical Inclusion of People with Disabilities through Undergraduate Computing Education

The percentage of the worldwide population with some form of disability is rising, and computing technologies, if accessible, could facilitate full participation in society for these users. However, the issue of equal access to technology is rarely included in curricula for computing students. While prior educators have implemented specific interventions to train computing degree students about accessibility, there is a need for a systematic comparison of these methods. Thus, we are empirically investigating the efficacy of various educational interventions for training future computing professionals about inclusive technology development. The goal of this work is to provide evidence of best practices and to share resources necessary to replicate our interventions at other universities

Comparison of Block-Based and Hybrid-Based Environments in Transferring Programming Skills to Text-based Environments

Teachers face several challenges when presenting fundamental concepts of programming in the classroom. Several tools are introduced to give a visual dimension to support the learning process. They rely on code blocks, easily manipulated in a plug and play fashion, to build a program. These block-based tools intend to familiarize students with programming logic, before diving into text-based programming languages such as Java, Python, etc. However; when transitioning from block-based to text-based programming, students often encounter a gap in their learning. The student may not be able to apply block-based foundations in a text-based environment. To bridge the gap between both environments, we developed a hybrid-based learning approach. We found that on average a hybrid-based approach increases the students understanding of programming foundations, memorization, and ease of transition by more than 30% when compared to a block-based to text-based learning approach. Finally, we provide the community with an open source, hybrid-based learning tool that can be used by students when learning programming concepts or for future studies

The Road We’ve Traveled: 12 Years of Undergraduate Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology

In 1996, the Rochester Institute of Technology launched the first undergraduate software engineering program in North America. This paper briefly reviews the development of the program, and describes the program’s evolution up to the present. We illuminate both the constant aspects of the program – what we believe we got right – as well as the changes made in light of pedagogical, technological and disciplinary advances. We conclude by considering the current and future challenges for undergraduate software engineering education both at RIT and elsewhere

Accelerating K-12 computational thinking using scaffolding, staging, and abstraction

We describe a three-stage model of computing instruction beginning with a simple, highly scaffolded programming en-vironment (Kodu) and progressing to more challenging frame-works (Alice and Lego NXT-G). In moving between frame-works, students explore the similarities and differences in how concepts such as variables, conditionals, and looping are realized. This can potentially lead to a deeper under-standing of programming, bringing students closer to true computational thinking. Some novel strategies for teach-ing with Kodu are outlined. Finally, we briefly report on our methodology and select preliminary results from a pi-lot study using this curriculum with students ages 10–17, including several with disabilities

Collaborative Research: Engaging Blind and Visually Impaired Youth in Computer Science through Music Programming

Data management plan for the grant, "Collaborative Research: Engaging Blind and Visually Impaired Youth in Computer Science through Music Programming.

Increasing Skills in Accessibility through Integration in the Undergraduate Computer Science and Information Technology Curricula

Data management plan for the grant, "Increasing Skills in Accessibility through Integration in the Undergraduate Computer Science and Information Technology Curricula.