Leo C. Ureel

Lessons from our elders: identifying obstacles to digital literacy through direct engagement

In todays world, technological change outpaces many peoples ability to comprehend or trust it, let alone embrace it. It is vitally important that developers of pervasive technology for the elderly are grounded in the needs, experience, and capabilities of the people they seek to help. We have organized and participated in an ongoing outreach program that trains elderly residents of our rural community in digital literacy skills. The attendees at our help sessions, having been left behind in earlier iterations of the technological revolution, exemplify the challenges facing the designers of tomorrows assistive technology. We report on the lessons we have learned in this regard through the interactions with our elderly participants. We identify three recurring themes: anxiety stifles exploration, details obscure abstraction, lag complicates adoption - illustrating them with real stories gleaned from our records. We offer our program as a model for engagement with the elderly, helping them overcome their obstacles to literacy and giving us researchers a non-invasive perspective on their situation.

Breaking Digital Barriers: A Social-Cognitive Approach to Improving Digital Literacy in Older Adults

The ability to navigate the ever-changing world of digital technology is a new form of literacy, one that presents a considerable challenge to older adults. Digital literacy has quickly evolved from an option to a necessity, and the rapid pace of technological change makes it insufficient to simply teach older adults to use a single technology. Rather, they must develop flexible skills and technological self-efficacy in order to maintain their hard-earned digital literacy. For four years, our research group has led a digital literacy program to address older adults’ questions about digital tools and applications. Through our work, we have identified numerous socio-technical barriers that older adults encounter as they adopt new technology and explore the digital world. Here, we review these barriers, discuss the Social Cognitive Theory that informs our tutoring approach, and describe our ongoing work to formalize the training program and develop technology to support older adults online.

Eliciting Best Practices in Digital Literacy Tutoring: A Cognitive Task Analysis Approach

Responding to the increasing need for all citizens to be digitally literate, our research group has led a program for six years that addresses older adults’ questions about digital devices and applications. Our patrons confront a range of socio-technical barriers as they adopt new technology and explore the digital world, and our tutors have developed particular practices to identify and overcome these barriers. Using a cognitive task analysis methodology, we conducted semi-structured interviews with experienced tutors. From these, we derived a set of effective and replicable practices that can form the basis for similar programs elsewhere.

Discrete mathematics for computing students: A programming oriented approach with Alloy

Students in computing disciplines need a strong basis in the fundamentals of discrete mathematics. Traditional “offline” approaches to teaching this material provide limited opportunities for the kind of interactive learning that students experience in their programming assignments. We have been using the Alloy language and analysis tool to teach concepts in discrete structures and logic in an exploratory, programming-intensive way. We report on our efforts to build scaffolded Alloy exercises for newcomers to discrete mathematics, and we report on some initial findings based on our experiences with students.

Agile Communicators: Cognitive Apprenticeship to Prepare Students for Communication-Intensive Software Development

We report on our efforts to enhance our undergraduate computer science and software engineering curriculum, promoting what we term agile communication through practice in inquiry, critique and reflection. We are targeting early courses in our curriculum, so that students internalize agile practices as part of their personal software development process. Our approach constitutes a cognitive apprenticeship that engages students in authentic software settings and articulates processes that are traditionally left implicit. Communication-intensive activities are woven through this curriculum in a variety of ways. The POGIL framework provides a structured approach to inquiry. Automated feedback on test coverage, programming style and code documentation are provided through WebTA, a novel tool that we have integrated into the Canvas learning management system, providing communication by proxy that supplements instructor feedback with continual critique of code and documentation. A program of guided inquiry through real case studies of software communication prepares students for their team software activities, and a series of reflective exercises leads them to focus on their own team communication practices.

Software for senior citizens: An experiential learning course in gerontology, software usability and digital literacy

Two trends in the developed world - the marked growth in the percentage of the population identified as “elderly”, and an increased reliance on computing technology - make it imperative that the high technology designers of tomorrow understand the challenges, capabilities and context of elderly users. Our graduate course on “software for senior citizens” provides a broad background of material from human-computer interaction, gerontology, literacy studies and cognitive and learning sciences. Students also gain first-hand experience through weekly tutoring sessions with local elderly residents. These sessions yield observations and generate contacts from which students generate research projects. This paper discusses our goals and motivations for the course, our experiences to date, and our plans for future iterations and opportunities for expansion.

WebTA: Online Code Critique and Assignment Feedback (Abstract Only)

We present a demonstration of our WebTA tool, which facilitates the teaching of programming by providing automatic critique and grading of student source code. Programming is in fact a complex set of interconnected activities. Learning to design, analyze, implement, test, and revise software is crucial for student success, not just for computer science students but for a broad and growing body of students in other disciplines as well. Our approach is to teach students agile development methods through small cycles of teaching, coding integrated with testing, and immediate feedback. WebTA facilitates our teaching approach by providing automatic critique of student source code. WebTA provides immediate feedback to students and gives them experience with interactive, test-driven development. Students using WebTA are engaged in communication-by-proxy with the instructor. This communication does not replace instructor feedback; rather, it codifies common feedback scenarios, triggered by errors, warnings, or textual code analysis, to assist the instructor in reaching students just when the student is engaged in problem solving and learning. This prompts the student to reflect and refactor in an iterative design process. WebTA compiles student code and executes it over a series of shakedown tests. It also analyzes student performance and generates preliminary grading reports. Students are coached through code critiques and suggestions that prompt them to reflect and refactor. The demonstration consists of a walkthrough of two use-case scenarios: Student use of WebTA as a code snippet critiquer and its use by faculty as an automated grading system.

The impact of placement in introductory computer science courses on student persistence in a computing major

Multiple studies have shown that when novice and experienced programmers are enrolled in the same introductory programming course, the novice programmers are negatively impacted. We have two entry points into our course sequence for majors. One course is intended for students with little or no programming experience, while the alternate course is intended for students who have had previous programming experience. In 2015 we discovered that many students with programming experience were enrolling in the course for novice programmers. A change in our placement strategy in 2016 resulted in a greater portion of the students with programming experience actually enrolled in the course intended for students with programming experience. Last year we reported on the impact this change had on the courses and the students enrolled in these introductory courses. Although student performance improved only slightly, many fewer students with little or no previous programming experience reported that their first programming course was unreasonably difficult in 2016. In this paper we examine how this change in placement strategy and resulting changes in the courses is impacting student persistence in the major. Initial indications are that a greater percentage of students with little or no previous programming experience are persisting in their computing major when these students begin in an introductory course that does not also include students who have substantial programming experience.

WebTA: Automated iterative critique of student programming assignments

We introduce an interactive tool called WebTA that facilitates learning through automatic critique of student source code. Our tool provides immediate feedback to students and gives them experience with test-driven development. Students receive the benefits of cognitive apprenticeship through the feedback they receive in the tool. This facilitates tight, productive cycles of inquiry, critique and learning. WebTA compiles each student submission and executes it over a series of shakedown tests. Immediate feedback is given concerning errors and warnings, coupled with suggestions for debugging. The tool performs a textual analysis of the students source code and critiques programming style based on standard programming guidelines. To encourage inquiry through test-driven development, edge-case coverage, and API compliance, students develop and submit their own tests to be evaluated by the software. We report on use of WebTA in one first-year programming course and one second-year data structures course. Lab and assignment scores have improved with WebTA, and student comments attest to the effectiveness of the tool. Preliminary results indicate students receive higher grades with WebTA. One area with mixed results is WebTAs analysis of student developed JUnit tests; this feature improved API compliance but reduced edge-case testing. With these successful initial results, we offer suggestions for future development.