Computer Science fields have a difficult time engaging underrepresented populations such as African Americans and women. EarSketch is an approach to engage these student through authentic STEAM learning involving computational music remixing. EarSketch has been used in several pilot studies. In this study, students from one pilot study participated in a focus group to understand the effectiveness of EarSketch in engaging underrepresented minorities. Qualitative analysis shows a variety of contributing factors in engagement such as motivation, confidence, identity, conceptualization, and creativity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006. / Elizabeth Mynatt, Committee Member ; Janet Kolodner, Committee Member ; Amy Bruckman, Committee Chair ; Michael Eisenberg, Committee Member ; Mark Guzdial, Committee Member. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Multimedia content, e.g., sound files, interactive demos, and video files, has been widely used in digital courses to provide an easy to use format and to emphasize the ideas. In this work, we address aspects of generating multimedia contents automatically in digital courses. In particular, we focus on two types of automatically generated multimedia: interactive glossaries and sound files. Glossaries play a major role in enhancing students' comprehension of the course core concepts. Glossary terms have complex interrelationship that cannot be fully illustrated by standard approaches, e.g., including all the terms as a linear, alphabetized list. To overcome this limitation, we introduce an interactive design for the glossary terms using concept maps. Glossary terms are visualized as nodes in graphs and their relationships are included on the edges. We implement these concept maps within the OpenDSA e-textbook system. A concept map associated with the selected term is generated on demand. We evaluate the effectiveness of our design by comparing student use of our concept-map based glossary to the traditional alphabetized list. We have designed new exercises that target the comprehension of the glossary terms to make students familiar with the concept maps. Our other work generates sound files automatically to supplement text narration in slide shows. This is made feasible by the widespread availability of text-to-speech generators in web browsers. To this end, we designed an interactive narration tool and integrated it into the OpenDSA library. In this way, all slide shows automatically have their text augmented with narration. / Master of Science / Recently, there has been an increase in the use of multimedia contents in digital courses. Multimedia files, e.g., sound files, interactive demos, and video files, are used in digital courses to provide an easy to use format and to emphasize the ideas. In this work, we address aspects of generating multimedia contents in digital courses. In particular, we focus on two types of automatically generated multimedia: interactive glossaries and sound files. Glossaries play a major role in enhancing students’ comprehension of the core concepts in the courses. In general, glossary terms have complex interrelationship that cannot be fully illustrated by standard approaches, such as the alphabetized list. To overcome this limitation, we introduce an interactive design for the glossary terms using concept maps. In this design, glossary terms are visualized as nodes in graphs and their relationships are included on the edges. We implement these concept maps within the OpenDSA e-textbook system to be generated on demand. We evaluate the effectiveness of our design by comparing student use of our concept-map based glossary to the traditional alphabetized list. We have designed new exercises to make students familiar with the concept maps. Our other work generates sound files automatically to supplement text narration in slide shows. This was motivated by the widespread use of text-to-speech generators in web browsers. To this end, we designed an interactive narration tool and integrated it into the OpenDSA library so that all OpenDSA slide shows can benefit from the narration tool.

Automatic assessment tools are increasingly utilized in undergraduate programming courses to evaluate software solutions, streamlining the grading process for both students and professors. In spite of their benefits of speed and convenience, such online systems for providing instant feedback have the tendency to draw attention to performance-based outcomes while failing to reliably recognize the effort and hard work a student puts into a solution. For the many struggling students who are new to programming, this type of objective feedback can be discouraging and may decrease their motivation to stay engaged towards success. To address this issue, this paper explores strategies for more effectively recognizing student progress on programming assignments and identifying small tasks for students to complete that will steer them in the right direction. Further, this paper will discuss a gamification approach for adding ``Daily Missions" to Web-CAT, the Web-based Center for Automated Testing. From an evaluation of results gathered from student experiences with this latest version of Web-CAT at Virginia Tech, this paper will highlight the valuable potential gamification has in boosting student engagement in computer science learning. / Master of Science / In college computer science courses today, many students submit their assignments and receive instant feedback through online websites. Although they streamline the grading process for both students and professors, these systems have the tendency to draw attention to performance-based outcomes while failing to reliably recognize the effort and hard work a student puts into a solution. For the many struggling students who are new to programming, this type of objective feedback can be discouraging and may decrease their motivation to stay engaged towards success. To address this issue, this paper explores strategies for more effectively recognizing student progress on programming assignments and identifying small tasks for students to complete that will steer them in the right direction. One strategy in particular is called gamification, which refers to giving game-like attributes to a non-game system. This paper will discuss a gamification approach for adding “Daily Missions” to WebCAT, the Web-based Center for Automated Testing. From an evaluation of results gathered from student experiences with this latest version of Web-CAT at Virginia Tech, this paper will highlight the valuable potential gamification has in boosting student engagement in computer science learning.

Teaching good software development practices is difficult, both in theory and in practice. Time management and project organization are skills often left by the wayside by students too focused on the coding itself. Educational research has been invested in developing strategies to combat these bad habits. In order to provide better support for interventions discouraging bad development habits, more data about student development is needed. The purpose of this research is to design and implement software to collect data continuously as students work on programming projects and provide it in useful forms to instructors and researchers so that they may make headway in designing new curricula, assignments, and interventions that better help students to succeed. The DevEventTracker is a software system that interfaces with existing Web-CAT services to track student development data continuously, without any student effort. Development and compilation events are tracked within the Eclipse IDE through a plugin and sent to a Web-CAT server. Code snapshots corresponding to each event are also committed to a server-side repository. The system provides a dashboard as a set of instructor-visible web pages that display useful data in generated charts and tables. Data are presented in both class overview and individual student summaries. The system presented will enable future research in education and specifically in intervention development. Particularly, the system can be used to allow instructors to identify students who have a tendency to procrastinate and design more effective interventions. / Master of Science

This study investigated the implementation of computer-assisted education in the outcomes-based education system at Sterling Primary School in East London. A literature study was done on constructivism on which outcomes based education is based. The literature review also focused on computer-integrated education. The integration of computer-assisted education at Sterling Primary School was appraised with the help of the Evolutionary Model developed by Miller (1997). It was observed that the educators and learners at this school were trying to integrate computers into their teaching and learning process. Although this study focussed on the Intermediate Phase, it could provide a basis for further study in the field of computer-assisted education in Senior, and Further Education and Training Phases throughout the Republic of South Africa. / Dissertation (MEd (Computer-Assisted Education))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Curriculum Studies / unrestricted

The problem of this study concerns the performance of students in computer programming following exposure to a computer-aided instruction (CAI) drill in sequencing and practice exercises. The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not student success rates improve in computer programming after completing CAI sequencing drills and practice exercises.

Pair programming is a software development method which describes two programmers working together on the same computer, sharing one keyboard. This approach requires programmers to communicate frequently, which can lead the pair to experience certain benefits over solo programming, such as faster problem solving and a greater enjoyment of their work (Cockburn and Williams, 2001, Bryant et al., 2006). Many programmers approach their first pairing experience with scepticism, having doubts about their partner’s working habits and programming style, and about the additional communication aspects that this programming style entails (Williams et al., 2000). Despite a significant amount of research into pair programming of over 15 years, it is not evident what communication between the pair contributes to the task of pair programming. This work presents an analytic coding scheme which was derived from the observation of the communication of expert pairs working in industry. Over 35 hours of communication across 11 different pairs was analysed. This coding scheme was further refined to produce industry-inspired pair programming guidelines that assist novice pair programmers to improve their experience of pair communication. Findings indicate that introducing these guidelines to novice student pairs can have a positive impact on their perception of intra-pair communication, and on their perception of their partner’s contribution. Feedback received from expert pairs was used to add detail to the guidelines, which have been made publically available through an online resource.

With advances in mobile phone hardware, the demand for mobile applica- tions has risen drastically. This has resulted in mobile phones becoming a pop- ular new medium for application development. However, the body of knowledge for contextual examples and tutorials leaves much to be desired. As of January 2010, California Polytechnic State University has offered a mobile development class that teaches students how to write applications for phones running Google’s Android platform. This class aims at taking advantage of students’ current in- terest in mobile applications to teach them about difficult computer science topics. As a corollary, the class hopes to foster and encourage a sense of inde- pendence and entrepreneurship through having students design, implement, and publish their own applications to the Android Application Marketplace. The main contribution of this thesis project comes in the form of a series of detailed educational laboratory exercises and a system for grading student submissions in an automated fashion. These labs are designed to supplement the Android documentation by providing contextual examples, activities, and tutorials. It is therefore the goal of this thesis project to aid in transforming the class of mobile development students into a group of successful, practicing, mobile developers.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Lynn Davie.