Well rested, it is time for conference again! Keynote today by code.org. When teaching someone programming, you don't tell them this is overloading or this is event handling, but instead the base concept. CS is starting to count for high school graduation requirements at the state level, but districts and universities are slower to change. CSEd Week is Dec 8 - 14 this year, for another Hour of Code. The first one had impressive results (including almost 50/50 male / female ratio) and the key thing is that this hour is providing a foot in the door. So the hour is meant as a just a start and 97% of teachers rated the hour positively.
Adding parallel programming in CS2. Students are taught OpenMP pragmas as applied to for loops. Projects assigned around matrix operations and image processing. Part of the teaching is done through live coding, which is based on demoing patternlets. Students see this component as exciting and fresh. All problems are restricted to those not requiring synchronization. (see Csinparallel.org).
Board game strategy development in CS2. Instructors provide the engine, which provides the graphics and true game state. Students write a player that maintains its representation of the state and decides on a move. In my CS3? we had a similar project with reversei / othello as the game. Then for research, half of the students were assigned to develop components in the game engine and other students developed the players. Students developing players had higher enjoyment and felt they learned more, although there was little difference in grades.
I also visited several posters that were interesting. In one, they studied why students dropped out of CS1 courses. Only two measures were statistically significant: first, how much computer science experience a student had before taking the class, and second, how busy (total work, not just credits) the student was that semester. Switching to active-learning had no real effect. Gender made no difference. Intention of majoring in computer science was not a factor.
The other poster looked at measuring the style of the code in CS1 assignments automatically. They found that their tool was able to cluster the student submissions based on stylistic similarity and that grades for each cluster had a 90% confidence. I'm intrigued! Style is important and being able to emphasize style further is great.
And then I talked with other attendees for many hours, which is one of the reasons that I'm there.
Friday, March 7, 2014
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!
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!
Conference Attendance SIGCSE 2014 - Morning Day 1
Here I am attending a Computer Science education conference. Started off with an interesting keynote, a break and meet a couple of faculty, and now the first paper session.
How to integrate software engineering into upper-level undergraduate courses? A project centered course, which included readings of selected research, as well as visiting local software development companies. Surveying the students before and after the class, and student confidence went down after the course, because students had learned how difficult the problems are. Yet students were more engaged into learning more about the subject and the resulting projects were of a higher quality.
Using real projects in software testing. Students, in teams, select a real world project. They develop a test plan, provide a progress report (requested by the students), and a final presentation. The instructor is both a customer and a coach. Able to work with the project developers. Target is generally low hundreds of classes in the project. Most students enjoyed the project and enrollment has increased. Students fill out a 360 survey on their teammates, and instructor intervention for outliers both positive and negative.
Student code is not throw aways. Best paper award. Prior work on software maintenance has usually relied on artificially prepared code, including lecturer added bugs. For this work, the code developed by prior seniors (11kloc, java, multithreaded) was provided to juniors in an intermediate version, who then added a feature and fixed bugs. Do students then follow proper practices? Most did, but a minority concluded, for example, that the code could not be tested. Many students observed the importance of quality design and had the experience of working on someone else's code base.
How to integrate software engineering into upper-level undergraduate courses? A project centered course, which included readings of selected research, as well as visiting local software development companies. Surveying the students before and after the class, and student confidence went down after the course, because students had learned how difficult the problems are. Yet students were more engaged into learning more about the subject and the resulting projects were of a higher quality.
Using real projects in software testing. Students, in teams, select a real world project. They develop a test plan, provide a progress report (requested by the students), and a final presentation. The instructor is both a customer and a coach. Able to work with the project developers. Target is generally low hundreds of classes in the project. Most students enjoyed the project and enrollment has increased. Students fill out a 360 survey on their teammates, and instructor intervention for outliers both positive and negative.
Student code is not throw aways. Best paper award. Prior work on software maintenance has usually relied on artificially prepared code, including lecturer added bugs. For this work, the code developed by prior seniors (11kloc, java, multithreaded) was provided to juniors in an intermediate version, who then added a feature and fixed bugs. Do students then follow proper practices? Most did, but a minority concluded, for example, that the code could not be tested. Many students observed the importance of quality design and had the experience of working on someone else's code base.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Ongoing Goto Wars
Recently, Apple announced a security fix for their SSL implementation. I would have taken little note here, except WIRED's summary indicated the cause being the use of goto. Ah, goto, how useful you are. How abused you are.
In practice, I would also have used goto, if I was writing a series of conditionals where I only have a single error block. The code could be restructured to link all of the conditionals into a single clause, yet it also tries to retain the specific error code for the check that failed. I would really dislike to see the following:
Leave me to shrug. I'll use my goto, sparingly. And I'll continue to try to impress on students that they and all of us programmers will make mistakes so write elegant code to help find these bugs. Until then, if anyone has a good construction for the error code that doesn't require goto, let me know.
In practice, I would also have used goto, if I was writing a series of conditionals where I only have a single error block. The code could be restructured to link all of the conditionals into a single clause, yet it also tries to retain the specific error code for the check that failed. I would really dislike to see the following:
if ((e = foo) != 0 && (e = bar) != 0 && ...) goto fail;So what then? Do we call upon the software engineering folk to better analyze programs and find these mistakes? Or write style guidelines that require braces for every if, and ban every goto? And then the employee's manager is required to sign off on every exception. These are some of the many proposals floated for addressing this, and often made by programmers touting the superiority of their proposal and how this would never happen to them.
Leave me to shrug. I'll use my goto, sparingly. And I'll continue to try to impress on students that they and all of us programmers will make mistakes so write elegant code to help find these bugs. Until then, if anyone has a good construction for the error code that doesn't require goto, let me know.
Friday, February 21, 2014
Being Nice on the Internet
I am sitting in Catherine Grevet's thesis proposal on supporting diverse opinions online (e.g., NBC News). The intent is not to achieve some undescribed utopia, but rather establish mechanisms that encourage civil discourse. The goal is not consensus, but rather engagement.
Looking at links and replies, links are more commonly made to similar opinions as the linker. Replies do not have this distribution, but the replies are often incivil and not constructive.
Under what conditions do different opinions coexist in social media? If these links are being maintained, then it is possible for the opinions to coexist and suggest possibility that conditions could be identified. Through twitter, politically active (based on sharing white house petitions) social users were contacted about how they manage this issue. Four techniques were identified:
tuning out, long fruitless conversations, weak ties were brittle (don't want to unfriend, but...), and changing perceptions of friends. These behaviors reinforce homophily.
Research questions:
So keep an eye out for a new plugin!
Looking at links and replies, links are more commonly made to similar opinions as the linker. Replies do not have this distribution, but the replies are often incivil and not constructive.
Under what conditions do different opinions coexist in social media? If these links are being maintained, then it is possible for the opinions to coexist and suggest possibility that conditions could be identified. Through twitter, politically active (based on sharing white house petitions) social users were contacted about how they manage this issue. Four techniques were identified:
tuning out, long fruitless conversations, weak ties were brittle (don't want to unfriend, but...), and changing perceptions of friends. These behaviors reinforce homophily.
Research questions:
- How does discouraging incivility impact the discourse between friends of different opinions in social media?
- How does encouraging civility impact the discourse between friends of different opinions in social media?
So keep an eye out for a new plugin!
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Book Review: Turing's Cathedral
Recently, I read the work of history, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Vintage), which is an interesting book that tells of the development of some of the first computers in the United States. It's particular focus is on the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and then John von Neumann's time there. Now, the von Neumann architecture is something I regularly conceptualize and use in teaching. And it was interesting to read of how this architectural model was developed, and why.
In contrast, a significant portion of the book was instead written as a history of the Institute. Given that the Institute provided access to the records used as a significant part of the source material, it is understandable that the author's focus would be so directed. However, it adds to the misleading focus that this work follows.
Of perhaps greater slight is that a work titled "Turing's Cathedral" only features Alan Turing for a small part of the writing. Instead we find greater focus placed on his work and how it fit into the research of that time. Eventually leading von Neumann to explore the usage of electronic digital computers to solve the US military's problems. He, like many European scientists, had left his homeland ahead of Hitler, and these scientists supported work leading to Germany's defeat.
The grand development that von Neumann introduced was making a computer, programmable. Beyond just reconfigurable, the project he lead at the IAS was programmable, the electronic device could store both data as well as codes that were instructions for what the device was to do. Consider that for the next 50 years, programs would be constrained by having to store the instructions in memory, which was often a very limited resource.
So John von Neumann stars in a book titled for Turing, and a book that devotes a third of its pages to references. A good, interesting work that could probably have been improved by an editor's scissors. To trim the writing down to the core bits about computers, and set aside so much of the well researched chapters to attain a focus that is lacking.
In contrast, a significant portion of the book was instead written as a history of the Institute. Given that the Institute provided access to the records used as a significant part of the source material, it is understandable that the author's focus would be so directed. However, it adds to the misleading focus that this work follows.
Of perhaps greater slight is that a work titled "Turing's Cathedral" only features Alan Turing for a small part of the writing. Instead we find greater focus placed on his work and how it fit into the research of that time. Eventually leading von Neumann to explore the usage of electronic digital computers to solve the US military's problems. He, like many European scientists, had left his homeland ahead of Hitler, and these scientists supported work leading to Germany's defeat.
The grand development that von Neumann introduced was making a computer, programmable. Beyond just reconfigurable, the project he lead at the IAS was programmable, the electronic device could store both data as well as codes that were instructions for what the device was to do. Consider that for the next 50 years, programs would be constrained by having to store the instructions in memory, which was often a very limited resource.
So John von Neumann stars in a book titled for Turing, and a book that devotes a third of its pages to references. A good, interesting work that could probably have been improved by an editor's scissors. To trim the writing down to the core bits about computers, and set aside so much of the well researched chapters to attain a focus that is lacking.
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