Colleen M. Lewis

How programming environment shapes perception, learning and goals: logo vs. scratch

This study compares the attitudinal and learning outcomes of sixth grade students programming in either Logo or Scratch. Given proposed affordances of the visual programming language, Scratch, I hypothesized that those students learning Scratch would demonstrate greater competence in interpreting loops and conditional statements and would have more positive attitudes towards programming. However, differences in performance between the two groups appeared only in the greater ability of the students that learned Scratch to interpret conditional statements. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that students that learned Logo had on average higher confidence in their ability to program and students were no more likely to plan to continue to program after the course or view the learning of topics as difficult if they learned Logo or Scratch.

Is Pair Programming More Effective than Other Forms of Collaboration for Young Students

This study investigates differences between collaboration methods in two summer enrichment classes for students entering the sixth grade. In one treatment, students used pair programming. In the other treatment, students engaged in frequent collaboration, but worked ontheir own computer. Students in the two treatments did not differ significantly in their performance on daily quizzes or responses to attitudinal survey questions. However, the students who worked on their own computer completed exercises more quickly than those using pair programming. This study compares two learning environments with high levels of collaboration to isolate aspects of pair programming that are and are not responsible for the reported success of educational research focused on pair programming. This study expands our understanding of pair programming by moving beyond simplistic comparisons of learning environments with and without collaboration and by extending pair programming research to elementary school students.

Experiences with Lab-Centric Instruction.

Lab-centric instruction emphasizes supervised, hands-on activities by substituting lab for lecture time. It combines a multitude of pedagogical techniques into the format of an extended, structured closed lab. We discuss the range of benefits for students, including increased staff interaction, frequent and varied self-assessments, integrated collaborative activities, and a systematic sequence of activities that gradually increases in difficulty. Instructors also benefit from a deeper window into student progress and understanding. We follow with discussion of our experiences in courses at U.C. Berkeley, and using data from some of these investigate the effects of lab-centric instruction on student learning, procrastination, and course pacing. We observe that the lab-centric format helped students on exams but hurt them on extended programming assignments, counter to our hypothesis. Additionally, we see no difference in self-ratings of procrastination and limited differences in ratings of course pace. We do find evidence that the students who choose to attend lab-centric courses are different in several important ways from students who choose to attend the same course in a non-lab-centric format.

Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology: A Decade of Broadening Participation

The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology is a decade-old endeavor to expose pre-college young women and underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities to the fields of computer science and engineering, and prepare them for rigorous, university-level study. We have served more than 150 students, and graduated more than 65 seniors who have gone on to attend some of the top institutions in the country. Some of the lessons we have learned include the importance of sustained funding to support a continuing year-round program, world-class leaders and resources, and family and alumni involvement. In this article, we share the inner workings of our program, from its foundation during the dot-com heyday through today, in hopes that our best practices can be useful to others working toward the goal of broadening participation.

Using collaboration to overcome disparities in Java experience

The lower-division CS curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley includes a version of CS 2 that is intended to introduce students to Java as well as data structures and programming methodology. Some students in the course already have Java experience. In one course offering, students without previous Java experience received final grades that were 0.27 standard deviations below their peers who already had some Java experience (d=0.27, p<0.05). In a subsequent offering, the instructor adopted course policies and teaching strategies that made student collaboration more frequent in hopes that students without Java experience could learn from their peers with Java experience. In this highly-collaborative offering, there were no statistically significant differences in average final grades between students with and without Java experience (d=0.12, p<0.1). A smaller percentage of students dropped the highly-collaborative offering than the less-collaborative offering. This decrease in attrition was most notable for female students, from 37 percent to 5 percent.

Integrating students' prior knowledge into pedagogy

A dissertation overview addressing what resources students bring to learning to program, which may provide explanations for why some students are more or less successful learning to program.

Integrating Social Justice Topics into CS1: (Abstract Only)

Meaningful and engaging assignments are important to retention in CS. An interesting problem context may be able to make routine practice of programming basics more interesting for students. Problem contexts also provide the opportunity to bring in content related to social justice topics, which are important for providing students a well-rounded education. With funding from the NSF (#1339404), we have developed eight homework assignments that integrate social justice topics as the problem context for CS1 assignments. Workshop attendees will work in small groups to revise or adapt existing assignments, translate existing assignments into the language of their course, or develop a new assignment. Attendees will be encouraged to submit their work to Nifty Assignments for 2019 and NCWITs peer-reviewed curriculum repository, Engage CS Edu (engage-csedu.org). All assignments will be posted on CSTeachingTips.org to be shared with the community.

What Would You Say if...: Responding to Microaggressions, Bias, and Other Nonsense

Many SIGCSE attendees are committed to inclusive teaching practices and creating an inclusive culture within their classrooms; yet, advocating for and sustaining these initiatives may require having difficult conversations with our colleagues and students. Understandably, many faculty are unsure about how to talk about sensitive topics such as race and gender with their colleagues and students. Research suggests that practicing some of these difficult conversations is essential to achieve the goals of inclusive teaching and culture. Most SIGCSE attendees probably use active learning throughout their teaching, but we rarely see active learning at SIGCSE - lets try it! In this interactive session, attendees will learn strategies for responding to bias in academic settings. Attendees will then practice those strategies in small groups. This will be facilitated by playing two rounds of a research-based game learning approach developed by the NSF project CSTeachingTips.org (#1339404), which has been tested in group of 200 teaching assistants. This is the fifth iteration of the game-learning approach and all attendees will receive a printed copy of the game and a link to download and print more copies.

TECHNOLOGY THAT EDUCATORS OF COMPUTING HAIL (TECH) Using your inbox as a to-do list (even though you shouldn't)

P eople always tell me, don’t use your inbox as a to-do list. Okay. Sure. That seems like reasonable advice. I should be carefully planning my time so that I’m always doing the most important work and not just responding to things as they come in. That’s a lovely idea completely disconnected from my reality. I get what feels like a flood of email everyday with questions, requests, and information. It seems like I could spend all day just moving the items from my inbox-to-do-list into a proper to-do list. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will spend about 90 minutes on email a day (not counting class related emails). If I’m not doing that, I’ll feel completely overwhelmed. For me, this time on email is like exercising on a treadmill. Sure, I’m not going anywhere, but if I do it every day I’m much less stressed. Despite the reasonable advice to the contrary, I have now accepted that I am going to use my inbox as a to-do list, and I have incorporated five tools that make it a little less terrible.

Alternative Publishing and Dissemination of CS Education Research (Abstract Only)

Large volumes of Computer Science Educational (CS Ed) material are published every year but it is apparent that equally large volumes of this are not being read or having much impact on practice, or even available to the practitioners who could use it. How can we distribute CS Ed materials and information more effectively and in potentially innovative ways? This BOF will provide a platform for discussion on a selection of techniques that encourage discussion and dissemination of CS Ed techniques in the community. Is traditional publishing still a good approach or is it just part of a wider group of techniques?