Bachelor\u27s Thesis Seminar In Computer Sciences And Information Technology

A Bachelor’s thesis is typically an individually written literature review on a scientifically relevant topic. Additionally, some theses also describe empirical work or report an experiment. Firstly, we introduce how Bachelor’s theses are supervised in a joint thesis seminar for Computer Sciences and Information Technology at our university. The thesis seminar is organized three times a year. It consists of six small group meetings led by a supervisor and contains compulsory pre- and post-assignments and active peer discussions. In 2022, there were in total of 187 students participating in the spring, summer and autumn seminars. Secondly, we give an overview of the 98 completed theses. We classify the theses using ACM’s Computing Classification System and analyze keywords, the number of references and some other bibliometrics to learn about the students and the potential effects of their different study orientations. We also analyze 14 theses that reported practical work, like the implementation of an algorithm or using existing software tools. The main result of our work is to give a research-based view on the supervision of Bachelor’s theses, the organisation of the thesis seminar, and the bibliometrics of the completed thesis

Working-life ethical issues faced by engineers

In recent years, there have been public discussions about novel ethical issues emerging from new engineering fields, such as the usage of artificial intelligence. While those are important issues to discuss, they do not necessarily reflect the ethical issues engineers face in their work. In this paper, we discuss problems that engineers of different disciplines face in their professional life, based on a survey sent to members of the Association of Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland. From the 433 respondents, we received over 130 descriptions of ethical issues encountered within their professional lives. We divided the encountered issues of the survey into two main categories: ethical issues about general work life and those on more engineering-specific situations. The focus of this paper is on the engineering specific ethical issues and the reactions they encounter. We discuss about who noticed the problems and how the workplaces reacted to the issues. In addition, it is addressed whether companies have policies in place to handle ethical issues. Furthermore, we discuss the types of support the engineers indicated hoping to receive from different stakeholders. On a larger scale, the goal is also to gather knowledge on how to improve engineering education to meet the needs of future engineers on ethical issues.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Having it all: auto-graders reduce workload yet increase the quantity and quality of feedback

Due to COVID-19, teaching has moved online at an accelerated pace, and this movement will partially be permanent. Online teaching implies an automatic assessment of exercises. Using automated grading, the studied web development course (N=257) managed to serve students promptly and increase the amount of feedback received by students even if the number of submissions increased remarkably. Automatic graders guaranteed the uniformity of feedback, equal treatment, and most importantly, reduced the routine work of the personnel. Being less burdened, the course personnel could concentrate on assisting students in online discussion channels, where discussions were targeted for the students needing more help and support. Compared with previous manually assisted course implementations, the workload moved from "in situ" to prior to the course, where the most laborious part was the design of the exercises and the implementation of automatic graders. The amount of work for grading the exercises and assignment was decreased by about 70 per cent. In the graders, the feedback given by them is of paramount importance and should suggest necessary improvements. The graders enforced good coding conventions and other targets set for the code (e.g., maintainability and accessibility). In some cases, this feedback was modified during the course based on the difficulties experienced to give more targeted advice. Automatic grading provided a way for students to iteratively improve their code based on the feedback. The software and methods used in this course could be applied to such other courses and domains, where automatic grading is considered helpful.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Test Case Selection with Incremental ML

Context: Software projects applying continuous integration should run the tests very frequently, but often the number of test is huge and their execution takes a long time. This delays the feedback to the developer. Objective: Study if heuristic and especially incremental machine learning can help in finding an optimal test set that still finds the errors. Method: Several methods for reducing the tests were tested. Each method was applied to the example software its commit history, and the performance of the methods were compared. Results: The test set size can be radically reduced with automatic approaches. Furthermore, it was found that the incremental machine learning based test selection techniques eventually perform equally well or better than the best heuristic.Peer reviewe

“Why is this course pushing functional programming?” - educating well-rounded web developers with functional JavaScript

Imperative, object-oriented, and multi-paradigm programming languages are dominant in higher education. However, the use of functional languages is emerging. In parallel, features supporting functional paradigm (FP) have been added to languages traditionally categorized to other paradigms. Students benefit from fluency with several paradigms. In the studied primary Web Development course, JavaScript was used to familiarize students with selected features of the FP. The grading of the FP exercises was automatic. The automatic graders guaranteed the uniformity of feedback, treating each student’s submissions equally. Exercise graders accepted multiple submissions, and their feedback suggested code improvements to students. After each of the ten exercise modules, students (N=257) estimated the topic difficulty and gave feedback. The post-module questionnaires emphasized FP topics in particular. The results show that students are aware of programming paradigms, but more support should be offered when learning new ones, for instance, having more concrete instructions and hands-on videos. The need for more instructions was apparent as, after the course’s FP introduction, some students were still easily confused about such abstract FP concepts as ‘functions as first-class citizens’. However, exercise results showed that students learned to use the taught FP features. They found them difficult, but for example, the JavaScript concurrency model was found to be more difficult.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

LAOps : Learning Analytics with Privacy-aware MLOps

The intake of computer science faculty has rapidly increased with simultaneous reductions to course personnel. Presently, the economy is recovering slightly, and students are entering the working life already during their studies. These reasons have fortified demands for flexibility to keep the target graduation time the same as before, even shorten it. Required flexibility is created by increasing distance learning and MOOCs, which challenges students’ self-regulation skills. Teaching methods and systems need to evolve to support students’ progress. At the curriculum design level, such learning analytics tools have already been taken into use. This position paper outlines a next-generation, course-scope analytics tool that utilises data from both the learning management system and Gitlab, which works here as a channel of student submissions. Gitlab provides GitOps, and GitOps will be enhanced with machine learning, thereby transforming as MLOps. MLOps that performs learning analytics, is called here LAOps. For analysis, data is copied to the cloud, and for that, it must be properly protected, after which models are trained and analyses performed. The results are provided to both teachers and students and utilised for personalisation and differentiation of exercises based on students’ skill level.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Survey of Recent Research Topics on Effective Use of Communication Tools in Higher Education

Effective communication is crucial for the success and well being of students and faculty members in higher education. Communication can improve student’s learning outcomes by clarifying the expectations and learning objec- tives on both curriculum and course levels. Further inclusive communication can enable creating a sense of community and belonging among students and the faculty. In this article, we present the results of a literary survey conducted on recent research discussing communication practices and soft- ware communication tools in higher education. Both linear and interactive communication occur in variable contexts and between different participating roles. During campus lock downs caused by COVID-19 pandemic, teaching and related communication were moved into fully distance mode. For teaching and learning higher education institutions needed to rely on existing and newly created software platforms. Synchronous teaching and communication could be con- ducted using video and voice conferencing tools, like Zoom or Teams. Similarly asynchronous communication could use tools including forums or emails. The tools adopted during the pandemic largely remain in use after the comeback of blended learning. For future research one goal could be the creation of communication models that can integrate the roles, practices, and tools currently interacting in higher education.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe