Conference Attendance SIGCSE 2015 - Day 2 / 3

I recognize that Day 1 afternoon went “missing”.  I presented my poster and that consumed the sum total of my time.  While I am happy with all that I achieved with my poster (writing IRB protocol, independent work, analyzing my teaching, et cetera), it was not considered as a finalist for the student research competition (SRC). Yet I received significant feedback and a number of follow-ons that I will have to try to evaluate the next time(s) I teach.  I have been doing an excellent job of networking and speaking with my colleagues.  And I have seen several exciting techniques to improve my teaching.

BOF2: Preparing Undergraduates to Make the Most of Attending CS Conferences

This was a small Bird of the Feather (BoF), but we discussed some approaches and things to know before attending your first conference, and not just for undergraduates.  However, in some cases, undergraduates are attending their local institution and may never have traveled any significant distance.  What do they really need to bring?



In traveling, take some time to prepare students.  Let them know what to expect.  For example, it is okay to miss some paper sessions, and even return to your room entirely.  It is okay to ask questions 1:1.  Find groups where people are being introduced and join in.  Student volunteering, while takes time, also gives an additional individuals that you will know.  Use the people you know to introduce you to others at the conference.

MIPSUnit: A Unit Testing Framework for MIPS Assembly

This is just what it sounds.  A Ruby based framework that enables writing simple unit tests that will then be applied to a full simulation of the assembly executed.

A Web-based Simulator for Learning Multiprocessor Real-time Scheduling

The presenter(s) were not at this poster, but it showed a high quality interface for seeing the scheduling of threads according to different scheduling policies.  The intent here was not to explore races and parallelism, but rather see how scheduling decisions are made in an OS.

Raspberry HadooPI: A Low-Cost, Hands-On Laboratory in Big Data and Analytics

I was not expecting this poster.  You are walking along and then see 4 Raspberry Pi's all networked together.  Raspberry Pis and HPC?!  A small setup, but it is an interesting development that takes advantage of the low cost Pi and still provide an HPC platform for students.

Building the Pascaline: Digital Computing Like It's 1642 

Plastic parts all worked together to form replicas of Pascal's mechanical calculator.  Interesting and student assembled.

On the Evaluation of Student Team Software Development Projects

Teams of 4 students, approach is evaluated on courses from three years of major (sophomore on up).  Teams are formed with CATME (particularly using dissimilar GPAs in a group), as well as partner selection (when possible).  Students provide peer evaluations after each stage of the project.  Significant data collection looking particularly at what students prefer for to be the evaluation policy (between 100% of grade for the group’s work to 100% of the grade for the individual’s contribution).  This question was taken repeatedly throughout the semester, which leads to whether student preferences change?  More senior students prefer more weight being attributed to group.  The predictor for what grade split is at what point in the course is this surveyed, and effectively as soon as the teams are formed the students prefer to be graded primarily as a group.  Follow on study is looking at experience with team projects, trust in the ability to evaluate individual contribution, and other questions.  This is a hopeful data point.

What Influences CS Faculty to Adopt Teaching Practices?

How do faculty become aware and why do they try out teaching practices?  66 participants in CS, including chairs, tenure-track faculty, teaching faculty, and Ph.D. student instructors across 36 institutions.  First, the mental model of what an instructor does can differ significantly from what the instructor is actually doing.  Second, faculty can find out about practices through a variety of approaches, such as self-identifying that there is possible improvement in their teaching.  Faculty often trust other faculty like them (researchers to researches, lecturers to lecturers).  Third, when adopting a practice, faculty need to evaluate the effectiveness (see also my poster, student feedback, etc).  -- My efforts in this have been having different faculty (my recommendation letter writers) view my lectures / teaching, and thereby giving them demonstrations of different practices.

Personalized Attention @ Scale

"We lost the war on cheating"  Instead, we have to meet with students such that they are demonstrating their understanding of the code.  The requirements of submissions: attribute your sources and understand your submission.  Enables students to work together, use all sources, develop interview skills.  Enables reuse of assignments.  Grading is now 40% correctness / 60% code interview.  Rubric for each interview.  Students should arrive early and have their laptop ready to present / explain.  Students were better able to learn and complete the assignments, as well as feedback for improvement.  Students also felt better able to learn the material by being able to collaborate and not constrained by a collaboration policy.  There are some stressors, such as TAs having to meet with hundreds of students, as well as their inconsistencies.  -- This was perhaps the most exciting new technique that I saw / heard about.

Going ARM (in a box)

ARM, that exciting architecture, is ever more available for home development.  At first, I was intrigued by the low price points of a Raspberry Pi.  And I have one, yet I felt the difficulties of three things: the ARMv6 ISA, the single core, and 512MB of RAM.  For my purposes, NVIDIA's development board served far better.  At present, that board is no longer available on Amazon; however, I have heard rumors of a 64-bit design being released soon.

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 2, many of my concerns have been allayed.  I am also intrigued by the possibility it offers of running Windows 10.

Book Review: ARM Assembly Language: Fundamentals and Techniques

Besides reading an average of 5 research papers every week, I also read an average of one book each week.  Occasionally those books relate to computers and usually then I'll write about them here.  I had realized a couple months ago that I didn't really know anything about ARM processors, besides that they are low power.  It seemed remiss to be studying computer architecture and not know one of the modern architectures.  Thus I visited my school library and checked out a book.

This is the story of that book - ARM Assembly Language: Fundamentals and Techniques.  An interesting book that covered the basic of what I wanted to learn, but the short coming was that it had an expected environment that was different from mine.  ARM processors can be found in a greater diversity of devices than say, x86.  Yet, I am still thinking about the ARM processor as a drop-in replacement.  I look more to devices like Microsoft's Surface or a smartphone, and think about the presence of an OS, etc.

I learned particularly that the ARM instructions have bits to make them predicated.  And I realized then that conditional branches are really just predicated instructions.  If the predicate(s) are true, then take the branch.  Just another perspective on instruction sets.  Anyway, I look forward to getting a Raspberry Pi, so I can try out some of what I've learned and get a chance to also work through the assembly generated by compilers.