Can Undergraduate Computing Research Be Student-Driven? (Abstract Only)

This poster presents a potential way of promoting student driven computing educational research that may provide an alternate path or option to the traditional faculty-driven computing education research. We propose a unique model of inter-class student collaboration that motivates creativity, expands the scope of collaborative research and enables handling of conceptual gaps through inter-class peer mentoring. The proposed model engages students from an upper level class with students of a lower level class so that they can connect with each other in a peer mentor-mentee relationship to overcome conceptual gaps in learning. It provides upper level students with an exclusive opportunity to reinforce their conceptual grasps and engage in research for addressing the problems faced by lower level students. This proposed model of improvised peer collaboration promotes a new kind of service-oriented learning project in computing that inspires innovation and leads to research on finding ways to handle common conceptual limitations, thereby helping student retention by assisting lower level peer mentees. It also assists upper level peer mentors in self-driving towards research oriented thinking for inventing methods to solve authentic conceptual issues. The proposed model has been currently implemented in the UWGB computing curriculum, where CS2 students have been collaborating with CS1 students and have been participating in computing educational research as part of the process. These ongoing research experiments have analyzed the performance of the proposed model through data obtained by conducting student surveys. The collected survey data represent insightful evidences from preliminary evaluations of the proposed model.