{"title":"Parsons Problems to Scaffold Code Writing: Impact on Performance and Problem-Solving Efficiency","authors":"Xinying Hou, B. Ericson, Xu Wang","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594182","url":null,"abstract":"Novice programmers struggle with writing code from scratch. One possible way to help them is by using an equivalent Parsons problem on demand, where learners place mixed-up code blocks in the correct order. In a classroom study with 89 undergraduate students, we examined how using a Parsons problem as scaffolding impacts performance and problem-solving efficiency. Results showed that students in the Parsons as Help group achieved significantly higher practice performance and problem-solving efficiency than students who wrote code without help, while achieving the same level of posttest scores. These results improve the understanding of Parsons problems and contribute to the design of future coding practices.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127859145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Problem Solving Competitions: A Twist on the Traditional Hackathon","authors":"Shanon M. Reckinger","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594156","url":null,"abstract":"This tip, technique, and courseware proposal is presenting the details the design of a problem solving competition. This is a competition concept that can be used in place of or to prepare for a traditional hackathon. This style of competition is more friendly to first and second year students, less competitive, less of a time commitment, and more collaborative. Two different competition formats are presented. The first is called \"Problem Solving Speed Dating\", which works by pairing upperclassmen and underclassmen in a speed dating type exercise. The second is called \"Unwrapped Collaborative Problem Solving\", where students work on a team but with very specific (and intentionally restrictive) roles. Both competition formats were tested in five different workshops over the course of several years involving around 250 undergraduate students. Students reporting receiving similar benefits to a hackathon including: problem solving skills, teamwork, building community, and networking with industry.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125134229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scaffolding to Support Humanities Students Programming in a Human Language Context","authors":"M. Guzdial","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594157","url":null,"abstract":"Language is a key topic of interest for students in the humanities -- language is the way in which humans express themselves, communicate, and make art. Computing on language (e.g., recognizing language, generating language, building bots) can be a pathway into using computing for humanities contexts. At the University of Michigan, we are developing a new program to support students in liberal arts and sciences to learn about computing, explicitly including programming. We have designed two courses for introducing computing (1) in terms of creative expression and (2) around the implications of computing on justice. In both classes, we use a scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities to explore computing on language: (a) a teaspoon language for sentence generation and recognition, (b) a set of custom Snap blocks for sentence generation and recognition, (c) a set of custom Snap blocks for building Chatbots, and (d) an ebook activity for mapping from Snap to Python. Each language takes less than 10 minutes to introduce, with a wide variety of possible student activities (for in-class active learning or for later homework). While the tools build on each other, the earliest stage (the teaspoon language) could be used within a single class session in linguistics, communications, or other liberal arts courses.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123416581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Paul Zhang, Brandon Jaipersaud, Jimmy Ba, Andrew Petersen, Lisa Zhang, Michael Ruogu Zhang
{"title":"Classifying Course Discussion Board Questions using LLMs","authors":"Paul Zhang, Brandon Jaipersaud, Jimmy Ba, Andrew Petersen, Lisa Zhang, Michael Ruogu Zhang","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594202","url":null,"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) can be used to answer student questions on course discussion boards, but there is a risk of LLMs answering questions they are unable to address. We propose and evaluate an LLM-based system that classifies student questions into one of four types: conceptual, homework, logistics, and not answerable. We then prompt an LLM using a type-specific prompt. Using GPT-3, we achieve 81% classification accuracy across the four categories. Furthermore, we achieve 93% accuracy on classifying not answerable questions. This indicates that our system effectively ignores questions that it cannot address.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121562507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steven Bradley, M. Parker, Rukiye Altin, L. Barker, Sara Hooshangi, Samia Kamal, Thom Kunkeler, Ruth G. Lennon, Fiona McNeill, J. Minguillón, Jack Parkinson, Svetlana Peltsverger, Naaz Sibia
{"title":"A Methodology for Investigating Women's Module Choices in Computer Science","authors":"Steven Bradley, M. Parker, Rukiye Altin, L. Barker, Sara Hooshangi, Samia Kamal, Thom Kunkeler, Ruth G. Lennon, Fiona McNeill, J. Minguillón, Jack Parkinson, Svetlana Peltsverger, Naaz Sibia","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594209","url":null,"abstract":"At ITiCSE 2021, Working Group 3 examined the evidence for teaching practices that broaden participation for women in computing, based on the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Engagement Practices framework. One of the report's recommendations was \"Make connections from computing to your students' lives and interests (Make it Matter) but don't assume you know what those interests are; find out! \" The goal of this 2023 working group is to find out what interests women students by bringing together data from our institutions on undergraduate module enrollment, seeing how they differ for women and men, and what drives those choices. We will code published module content based on ACM curriculum guidelines and combine these data to build a hierarchical statistical model of factors affecting student choice. This model should be able to tell us how interesting or valuable different topics are to women, and to what extent topic affects choice of module - as opposed to other factors such as the instructor, the timetable, or the mode of assessment. Equipped with this knowledge we can advise departments how to focus curriculum development on areas that are of value to women, and hence work towards making the discipline more inclusive.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126275646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Student Perceptions of Resource Helpfulness","authors":"Seán Russell, B. Alshaigy","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594191","url":null,"abstract":"What do students perceive as helpful when they learn to program? This paper presents the results of this question from a survey conducted with 125 students enrolled in two online introductory programming courses. The question asked students to rank a number of resources and activities that they used or completed in their course. The results show that students perceive lecture videos as the most helpful resource while syntax exercises were seen as the most helpful activity. The spread of the student responses would seem to indicate that a more thorough and widely completed investigation of student perceptions of resources and activities would be beneficial to the field of computer science education.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132410797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Translate Together: Managed Translation and Peer-Review","authors":"Seán Russell, Suad Alaofi, B. Alshaigy","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594160","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes a tool for managing peer-reviewed translation activities within CS1 classes. The tool is designed to help students develop a better understanding of terms within class by writing and reviewing translations of those terms and their descriptions in their native language. The peer-review of the translations means that lecturers do not need to share the language of their students.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"31 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114003103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Technocamps: Highlighting 20 Years of Transforming Digital Education in Wales","authors":"T. Crick, Faron Moller","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594195","url":null,"abstract":"Computer science (CS) curriculum reform across the UK has been subject to substantial scrutiny, as it has in many other countries around the world. However, in Wales -- one of the four nations in the UK -- various political, geographical and socio-cultural issues have historically hindered major educational policy interventions or reforms for CS. In this poster, we highlight the activities and impact of Technocamps, a pan-Wales university-based schools outreach programme founded in 2003. We showcase its wider impact on CS education, practitioners, schools, and learners in Wales over the past 20 years; especially with the start of the new bilingual Curriculum for Wales (Cwricwlwm i Gymru) from September 2022, which includes major reform of CS alongside digital competence as a statutory cross-curricular skill for all learners aged 3-16.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114870054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards Grading for Equity in a Large CS1 Class: An Experience with Flexible Deadlines and Resubmissions","authors":"Frank Vahid, Ashley Pang, Kelly Downey","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594200","url":null,"abstract":"CS educators have increasing interest in equitable grading, to support differing student backgrounds, perspectives, and current life situations. Our course is heavily scaffolded (one aspect of equitable grading), with points for readings, homeworks, and lab assignments, every week. All those items are auto graded with instant feedback, partial credit, and resubmissions. Previously, we did not accept late work, except for rare exceptions. In Spring 2022, following equitable-grading advice to reduce emphasis on deadlines, we allowed work to be submitted (and resubmitted) up to 14 days after target dates, with a small 1% deduction/day, with students receiving whatever max score occurred across those 14 days. This paper analyzes how students made use of this \"late policy.\" The main finding was students did not shift all work by 1-2 weeks, as we originally feared; instead, students did most work by target dates. We found many of our 265 students only used the policy lightly (51%) or used it moderately (35%) to earn a few more points 1-2 days after target dates. Only 14% were heavy users of the policy, and they had reasonable course outcomes. Student feedback was positive, and instructors stated they saved time and energy due to reduced late requests.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132037489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Impact and Achievements of School Workshops as a University Outreach Activity in Computer Science","authors":"Martina Landman","doi":"10.1145/3587103.3594142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594142","url":null,"abstract":"With an ever increasing number of computing initiatives trying to engage and motivate children of all ages, we need to ask ourselves what these initiatives achieve and deliver. We therefore intend to investigate whether participation in a workshop setting changes students' approaches to solving selected computational thinking problems and extends their repertoire of problem-solving strategies. Methods used will include video analysis to collect data on the solutions and strategies, and a design-based research approach to create an effective task design for the workshop activities given to the students.","PeriodicalId":366365,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124729622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}