Ian Utting

A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students

In computer science, an expected outcome of a students education is programming skill. This working group investigated the programming competency students have as they complete their first one or two courses in computer science. In order to explore options for assessing students, the working group developed a trial assessment of whether students can program. The underlying goal of this work was to initiate dialog in the Computer Science community on how to develop these types of assessments. Several universities participated in our trial assessment and the disappointing results suggest that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory courses. For a combined sample of 216 students from four universities, the average score was 22.89 out of 110 points on the general evaluation criteria developed for this study. From this trial assessment we developed a framework of expectations for first-year courses and suggestions for further work to develop more comprehensive assessments.

Alice, Greenfoot, and Scratch -- A Discussion

This article distills a discussion about the goals, mechanisms, and effects of three environments which aim to support the acquisition and development of computing concepts (problem solving and programming) in pre-University and non-technical students: Alice, Greenfoot, and Scratch. The conversation started in a special session on the topic at the 2010 ACM SIGCSE Symposium on Computer Science Education and continued during the creation of the resulting Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Computing Education.

Blackbox: a large scale repository of novice programmers' activity

Automatically observing and recording the programming behaviour of novices is an established computing education research technique. However, prior studies have been conducted at a single institution on a small or medium scale, without the possibility of data re-use. Now, the widespread availability of always-on Internet access allows for data collection at a much larger, global scale. In this paper we report on the Blackbox project, begun in June 2013. Blackbox is a perpetual data collection project that collects data from worldwide users of the BlueJ IDE -- a programming environment designed for novice programmers. Over one hundred thousand users have already opted-in to Blackbox. The collected data is anonymous and is available to other researchers for use in their own studies, thus benefitting the larger research community. In this paper, we describe the data available via Blackbox, show some examples of analyses that can be performed using the collected data, and discuss some of the analysis challenges that lie ahead.

The ACM java task force: final report

Eric Roberts (chair), Stanford University, eroberts@cs.stanford.edu Kim Bruce, Pomona College, kim@cs.pomona.edu Robb Cutler, The Harker School, robbc@harker.org James Cross, Auburn University, cross@eng.auburn.edu Scott Grissom, Grand Valley State University, grissom@gvsu.edu Karl Klee, Alfred State College, kleekj@alfredstate.edu Susan Rodger, Duke University, rodger@cs.duke.edu Fran Trees, Drew University, fran@ftrees.com Ian Utting, University of Kent, i.a.utting@kent.ac.uk Frank Yellin, Google, Inc., fyellin@gmail.com

Building an open, large-scale research data repository of initial programming student behaviour

Many initiatives in improving learning of programming are based on gut instinct or localised experience. Gathering data as a basis for interventions, especially on a large scale, is hard. The BlueJ environment is being instrumented to collect data useful to a variety of educational programming researchers. BlueJ is ideally placed to collect such data: Users number in the millions, situated all over the world. This volume and diversity is unique in the history of such investigations and presents a significant opportunity for researchers. The data will be open to interested research groups, which will enable a wide variety of investigations that were previously impractical. This session presents work to date and solicits input from researchers about the design of the data collection.

The ACM java task force: status report

SIGCSE 2004 marked the official announcement of the ACM Java Task Force, which is working to develop a stable collection of pedagogical resources that will make it easier to teach Java to first-year computing students. The Java Task Force has received funding from the ACM Education Board, the SIGCSE Special Projects Fund, and the National Science Foundation (NSF Award DUE-0411905). This session offers an update on the work of the Java Task Force over the past year and provides an opportunity for community feedback prior to the publication of the final report in June 2005.

Preface to Special Issue on Initial Learning Environments

The seed for this special issue was planted when a group of computing educators were talking at the start of 2009. As we talked, we realized that while we had all heard of the major programming environments that are used for introductory teaching, and a few of us knew one or other of the environments in detail, no one was equally familiar with them all. We did not know their particular strengths nor why we should choose one over another. The three we had heard of and talked of are the following.

ILE-idol

This panel will showcase and compare three leading Initial Learning Environments (ILE): Alice, Greenfoot and Scratch.

Gathering and disseminating good practice at teaching and learning conferences

A wise colleague (Prof. John Slater) once suggested that no one should go to a ~conference or go on a visit without stealing 3 good ideas. Among the many good reasons for attending a conference such as ITiCSLI, fmding good ideas that will be of use in teaching Tips and Tricks is one of the most uselul and the most common. Unfortunately, with the parallel sessions and other activities, no one delegate will catch all the good matermk Individuals will talk about things they have heard (in paper presentations and elsewhere) and so there will be some dissemination of good practice, but this is a haphazard process.