Thursday, March 6, 2014

Conference Attendance SIGCSE 2014 - Afternoon Day 1

Concept inventory for Operating Systems! Develop an open concept inventory for a wider collection of classes, starting with an OS course. Work toward scenario questions to avoid issues with terminology. Consider page replacement, instead phrased about textbooks on a desk. Identify the concepts that are not intuitive by which answers have a higher percentage correct.  They have a public share.

Process oriented guided inquiry learning in CS1. How pogil differs from active learning? Self managed teams with roles and they work through inquiry based activities, with the instructor as the facilitator. Maintain group composition over several weeks, while rotating roles. Split into two pairs for programming exercises. Both information retention (between CS1 and CS2) and female pass rates have improved. They noted a website carrying many developed resources.

Learning how to teach big data (at the middle school). A narrative game based environment to solve problems via pair programming. Worked first with middle school teachers to learn the CS concepts and then working with them to understand how to teach the students about big data. I'll need to read the paper to better follow this work, yet I am favorable toward pushing more CS content into earlier classes.

Assessment model for large project courses. How do you assess students on a large project when the students have different roles and focuses? Assessment variations: Formative vs summative. Teacher vs student. Group vs individual. Each project group is around 30 students. Grading criteria, oral feedback from instructor at student meetings, coaching from fellow students (code reviews, hackathons, etc), on demand artifacts, student reports (including contribution and time spent), individual teacher assessments (using a rubric), then the final feedback report for the group, and the option of interviews with individual students. And a final retrospective lead by the group. Most students are happy to have their grade based on the group performance. Few saw value of the reflective report.

A repository of novice programmer activity. Two million unique users using BlueJ every year. Blackbox collects anonymous data on the users. Data on each programming session, like compilation including result, line by line diffs of any edits. Then an interesting small analysis on the most common errors and how common the errors are over the duration of a course.

ACM exemplar course integrating fundamentals, programming languages, and software engineering. The problem is covering the increasing diversity of computing, yet reducing the credits required for a degree. This necessitates an integrated approach. The presentation followed with a description of the course, which showed the transitions between the integrated concepts. Several closed lab exercises exist to ready students for subsequent lectures.

Now it is time for the birds of a feather sessions. I am told that in the past there had been a session for students looking for a job, but there wasn't one this year. Still, I am intrigued by active learning in systems courses!

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