The Stack: Unplugged Activities for Teaching Computer Science

The Stack is a free open repository of learning activities for adults that illustrate computing principles without a computer. We explain the rationale behind its development, describe its content with an example, and discuss its applications in university teaching practice

Teaching Lab: Training Novice Computer Science Teachers

Student teaching assistants are not uncommon in computer science. However, their pedagogical training is often only superficial. This poster presents the Teaching Lab – a mature and fully developed training course for novice teachers (mostly undergraduate teaching assistants), its core principles, content and unique features as it evolved over five years. Our experience can be helpful to others intending to create or adjust a training program for novice teachers

Avalanche Effect in Improperly Initialized CAESAR Candidates

Cryptoprimitives rely on thorough theoretical background, but often lack basic usability features making them prone to unintentional misuse by developers. We argue that this is true even for the state-of-the-art designs. Analyzing 52 candidates of the current CAESAR competition has shown none of them have an avalanche effect in authentication tag strong enough to work properly when partially misconfigured. Although not directly decreasing their security profile, this hints at their security usability being less than perfect. Paper details available at crcs.cz/papers/memics201

Challenges Faced by Teaching Assistants in Computer Science Education Across Europe

Teaching assistants (TAs) are heavily used in computer science courses as a way to handle high enrollment and still being able to offer students individual tutoring and detailed assessments. TAs are themselves students who take on this additional role in parallel with their own studies at the same institution. Previous research has shown that being a TA can be challenging but has mainly been conducted on TAs from a single institution or within a single course. This paper offers a multi-institutional, multi-national perspective of challenges that TAs in computer science face. This has been done by conducting a thematic analysis of 180 reflective essays written by TAs from three institutions across Europe. The thematic analysis resulted in five main challenges: becoming a professional TA, student focused challenges, assessment, defining and using best practice, and threats to best practice. In addition, these challenges were all identified within the essays from all three institutions, indicating that the identified challenges are not particularly context-dependent. Based on these findings, we also outline implications for educators involved in TA training and coordinators of computer science courses with TAs