Deborah A. Trytten

A design for team peer code review

The software industry needs our graduates to have significant and meaningful experiences with teamwork. A new design has been developed for a teamwork exercise based on peer code review. This design uses the three Ss of building assignments for cooperative learning: Same problem, Specific choices, and Simultaneous report. Students perform peer code review individually, and within and between stable small groups. The code can be sanitized student work or may be altered by the instructor to meet specific course learning objectives. The review is done in three phases. First, individuals answer yes or no to questions that evaluate the quality of the design and code. Then each group answers the same set of questions. When the groups have completed their evaluation, the class joins together to reveal and discuss the answers. This design was successfully implemented during the 2003-2004 academic year in an introductory programming class. This design is applicable to more advanced classes with significant programming assignments. Future work includes extending this structure to give students experience with other software engineering artifacts early in their academic careers.

Hard But Not Too Hard: Challenging Courses and Engineering Students

Some professors claim college students seek the easy way out and prefer classes that lack challenge. In a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional ethnographic research study of the attainment of gender parity in an engineering department, it emerged that student attitudes toward challenge did not support this perception. By far, the majority of participant responses on this topic fell into the category of hard classes that students liked. Student reasons for enjoying challenging classes include the desire to learn more and boredom in classes that lack challenge. Students dislike, however, a challenge that cannot be met.

Using turing's craft codelab to support CS1 students as they learn to program

This experiential paper focuses on CodeLab, a tool for improving student learning in CS1. We introduce the basic features of CodeLab, both from the student and instructor side, discuss the use of CodeLab at two different types of institutions, and compare CodeLab to other interactive programming tutor products (CodingBat, Problets, zyBooks, and Python Tutor) that we have used in the last academic year.

“We weren't intentionally excluding them…just old habits”: Women, (lack of) interest and an engineering student competition team

Student, experiential-learning, engineering, competition teams (SELECT) provide an opportunity for engineering students to practice engineering technical and professional skills. The low representation of women in SELECT is often rationalized as a lack of interest by individual women rather than systemic processes that discourage or exclude women. We employ a qualitative-interpretive design and a cultural constructionist lens to bring into focus the interplay of individual interests, understandings of appropriate gender roles, and structural elements that contribute to a culture of inclusion or exclusion. Primary data consist of 90-minute semi-structured interviews of eight team members and one non-member. By interpreting the narrative portraits of two female students, we show the construction of a team culture where in general women are discouraged from participation based on stereotyped gender roles, by night campus attitudes, and by peers who challenge or ignore their skills, contributions, and interests. One woman persevered through the male-dominated culture because she received the encouragement and support of male peers who engaged as comrades and champions. This paper offers recommendations for institutions to demonstrate commitment to equitable access to experiential learning and to nurture student peer cultures that challenge historic gendered ideologies and rhetoric.

The construction of labeled line drawings from intensity images

The Marr paradigm for object recognition has been widely used in computational vision (?). This paradigm emphasizes the data driven reconstruction of 3D shape from intensity images. There are a large number of paradigms that can perform this reconstruction in a limited sense, but no paradigm or group of paradigms has yet been shown to perform this reconstruction in a general setting. A shortcoming of the Marr paradigm, as demonstrated by Lowe (?), is the failure to include grouping processes that do not directly reconstruct shape. These grouping processes are collectively called perceptual organization. Lowe proposed the addition of four paths to the Marr paradigm to rectify this shortcoming. Two of Lowes paths are used in this work. The first is the collection of tokens in the image plane into perceptual groupings. The second is 3D inference from these groupings. The collection of tokens in the image plane into perceptual groupings is done using an integration framework implemented as a blackboard system. Four modules were used as knowledge sources: weak membrane edge detection, curvilinear grouping, proximity grouping, and curvilinear line labeling. An initial representation of the image data is built using the first three knowledge sources. This representation is analyzed using a modified curvilinear line labeling algorithm developed in this thesis that uses figure-ground separation to constrain legal line labelings more closely than the Malik algorithm (?). This modified line labeling algorithm can diagnose problems with the initial representation. Errors in the representation can be fixed using a set of heuristics that were created to repair common mistakes. If no irreparable errors are found in the representation, then the modified line labeling algorithm produces a 3D interpretation of the data in the input image. The 3D interpretation is created without explicitly recovering 3D shape, and is therefore similar to the 3D inference processes proposed by Lowe.

Work in progress — Factors affecting the successful completion of an industrial engineering program by students from rural communities

Although many programs that seek to increase the diversity of engineering have chosen to focus on sex and race/ethnicity, U.S. engineering students tend to be homogeneous in other dimensions too. We are currently examining differences in experiences for successful students coming from rural backgrounds. To answer this question we have re-analyzed a set of interviews from industrial engineering students at a single large Midwestern public university that has significant populations of rural, suburban, and urban students. Students were aggregated into subgroups based on the size of the students high school community. This qualitative study explores the experiences of five rural engineering students. We have found that the academic success of these five students is affected by their academic preparation, interaction with faculty, and interaction with their peers. Interestingly, these five students were most affected by experiences that either increased or diminished their relationship with faculty or their peers.

ECAT: An electronic data analysis tool for ABET display materials

ABET, Inc. requires that display materials, including syllabuses, assignments and examples of student work, be collected the year before an accreditation site visit. The Exhibit Collection and Analysis Tool (ECAT) was created to electronically store and organize display materials for our program in a manner that was useful for ABET program evaluators. ECAT was designed as a simple, maintainable, structured search engine. The ABET program evaluator who visited our institution repeatedly praised ECAT at length. ECAT was used to count the number of occurrences of assignments that support each of the eleven ABET program outcomes, resulting in a novel metric to support outcomes assessment. ECAT could be extended to include classifications in Blooms taxonomy, to check program depth in addition to breadth. Future uses for ECAT include building an electronic portfolio for our program, similar to the e-portfolios that some engineering programs build for outcomes assessment.

Learning the structure of retention data using Bayesian networks

We introduce a novel approach to examining retention data by learning Bayesian Networks automatically from survey data administered to minority students in the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Bayesian networks provide a human readable model of correlations in large data sets, which enables researchers to improve their understanding of the data without preconceptions. We compare the results of our learned structures with human expectations and interpretation of the data as well as with cross-validation on the data. The average Area Under the Curve of the networks using cross-validation was 0.6. The domain experts believe the methodology of automatically learning such structures is promising and we are continuing to improve the structure learning process.

The career goals of non-tenure-track full-time engineering faculty

Roughly one in eleven engineering faculty members in the United States are full-time and are not in tenure-track positions. It has been established that non-tenure track faculty members can enrich an engineering program by bringing industry skills and practical career experience into the classroom. These full-time non-tenure track faculty members have varied experience and they have varied career goals. Some of them may desire tenure-track positions while others may not. In many engineering programs, there is no clear path for a full-time non-tenure-track faculty member to attain tenure. This study consists of interviews with ten full-time non-tenure-track electrical engineering faculty members who teach in eight large, public, research universities. The survey will explore the career goals of those faculty members including the desire for an electrical engineering tenure-track position as well as which aspects of a tenure-track position would be desirable, such as career stability, participation in departmental governance, and a greater voice in program decisions. We will also explore aspects of seeking a tenure-track position that may not be desirable, such as the increased workload involved in research and publishing, or a perceived necessity to teach fewer courses as more effort and time is given to research. This study consists of interviews with ten full-time non-tenure-track electrical engineering faculty members who teach in eight large, public, research universities. The survey will explore the career goals of those faculty members including the desire for an electrical engineering tenure-track position as well as which aspects of a tenure-track position would be desirable, such as career stability, participation in departmental governance, and a greater voice in program decisions. We will also explore aspects of seeking a tenure-track position that may not be desirable, such as the increased workload involved in research and publishing, or a perceived necessity to teach fewer courses as more effort and time is given to research.

Engineering Competition Team recruitment and integration strategies impact on team diversity

Engineering Competition Teams (ECT) recruit and integrate new members every year. We interviewed groups of students at two national and international competitions about the methods they use to recruit and retain students, in an effort to understand why ECT have low participation of students from underrepresented groups. None of the teams that were interviewed were especially diverse, in spite of our efforts to interview diverse students. We categorized their recruitment activities into strategies that require direct person interaction with a degree of personal invitation (active) and those that do not (passive) using a theoretical framework provided by Cegler [1]. Not all passive recruiting is done in ways that completely avoid personal interaction. Thus, for ECT, Ceglers passive category was separated into two categories: direct and indirect recruiting. Teams generally had more numerous recruiting strategies than integration strategies. We analyzed integration strategies using the theoretical framework of legitimate peripheral participation [2]. We found that while a handful of teams were using strategies that could fit into this theoretical framework, most were making critical mistakes including trying to integrate too many students and failing to allow new recruits to work at meaningful projects. The paper concludes with recommendations for recruiting and integration practices that may improve team diversity.