Stephanie Ludi

An introductory software engineering course that facilitates active learning

At the Rochester Institute of Technology, the undergraduate introductory software engineering course has been redesigned from a lecture-lab format to a project-centric studio format. The new format blends the lecture material with the project work. As a result, students drive their own learning experience based on scaffolding created by the course design. The challenges faced and the techniques and strategies utilized in the planning and delivery of the course will be discussed, including the utilization of online learning support infrastructure. This paper presents instructor experiences, analysis of student feedback, lessons learned and recommendations for other educators considering an active learning approach for their courses.

The Use of Robotics to Promote Computing to Pre-College Students with Visual Impairments

This article describes an outreach program to broaden participation in computing to include more students with visual impairments. The precollege workshops target students in grades 7--12 and engage students with robotics programming. The use of robotics at the precollege level has become popular in part due to the availability of Lego Mindstorm NXT kits. The robotics programming tools and materials used in the workshops are designed with an accessibility focus for participants with different degrees of vision. Through the use of available assistive technology and open source software, robotics is accessible to the visually impaired. The quantitative and qualitative results from three robotics workshops conducted during the past three years will be discussed, including some initial long-term results. Strategies, based on our experiences, will also be shared to promote accessible outreach. While many of the participants are in middle and early high school, findings indicate that participant interest in computing is high regardless of whether their schools offer computer science courses or not. Increased interest and confidence with robotics persists throughout follow-up activities.

Accelerating K-12 computational thinking using scaffolding, staging, and abstraction

We describe a three-stage model of computing instruction beginning with a simple, highly scaffolded programming environment (Kodu) and progressing to more challenging frameworks (Alice and Lego NXT-G). In moving between frameworks, students explore the similarities and differences in how concepts such as variables, conditionals, and looping are realized. This can potentially lead to a deeper understanding of programming, bringing students closer to true computational thinking. Some novel strategies for teaching with Kodu are outlined. Finally, we briefly report on our methodology and select preliminary results from a pilot study using this curriculum with students ages 10-17, including several with disabilities.

Introducing Accessibility Requirements through External Stakeholder Utilization in an Undergraduate Requirements Engineering Course

Undergraduate software engineering courses aim to prepare students to deliver software in a variety of domains. The manner in which these courses are conducted varies, though team projects with real or imaginary stakeholders are common. While the key course concepts vary from the entire lifecycle to specific aspects of design, concepts like accessibility are rare. This paper will present a study of team projects in a requirements engineering course. One group of students conducted projects with accessibility requirements while another group of students delivered projects without accessibility requirements. The course content was the same, including discussion of accessibility. To support the understanding of accessibility, stakeholders with disabilities were included in the requirements engineering process. Both teams benefited from the experience as indirect knowledge acquisition occurred. Students from a previous offering of the course, with no external stakeholder interaction, demonstrated lower levels of accessibility understanding.

Using Off-Line Features and Synthetic Data for On-Line Handwritten Math Symbol Recognition.

We present an approach for on-line recognition of handwritten math symbols using adaptations of off-line features and synthetic data generation. We compare the performance of our approach using four different classification methods: AdaBoost. M1 with C4.5 decision trees, Random Forests and Support-Vector Machines with linear and Gaussian kernels. Despite the fact that timing information can be extracted from on-line data, our feature set is based on shape description for greater tolerance to variations of the drawing process. Our main datasets come from the Competition on Recognition of Online Handwritten Mathematical Expressions (CROHME) 2012 and 2013. Class representation bias in CROHME datasets is mitigated by generating samples for underrepresented classes using an elastic distortion model. Our results show that generation of synthetic data for underrepresented classes might lead to improvements of the average per-class accuracy. We also tested our system using the Math Brush dataset achieving a top-1 accuracy of 89.87% which is comparable with the best results of other recently published approaches on the same dataset.

Towards a situation awareness design to improve visually impaired orientation in unfamiliar buildings: Requirements elicitation study

Requirements elicitation can be a challenging process in many systems. This challenge can be greater with a non-standard user population, such as visually impaired users. In this work, we report our experience and results of eliciting user requirements for a situation awareness indoor orientation system dedicated to the visually impaired. We elicited our initial system requirements through three different studies that focus on users along with orientation and mobility instructors. Also, we performed a knowledge elicitation through our studies to formulate our systems situation awareness requirements.

The benefits and challenges of using educational game projects in an undergraduate software engineering course

Devising team projects for an introductory software engineering course can be a challenge for educators. A balance between an engaging project that is complex enough for the team to complete in the timeframe of the course is required. This paper describes the experiences of using an educational game as the team project in a 10-week introductory software engineering course for second-year undergraduates. The motivation for the project and the project itself will be presented. Benefits of using a game project existing, but the challenges of using a game project were perceived to be high by some instructors. The reflection of the experience is meant to help other instructors to find the right fit for a game project in their introductory course.

JBrick: accessible lego mindstorm programming tool for users who are visually impaired

Despite advances in assistive technology, relatively few visually impaired students participate in computer science courses. Significant factors in this underrepresentation include lack of precollege preparation, access to resources, and the highly visual nature of computing. This poster describes the development of a prototype to provide an accessible programming environment for Lego Mindstorm NXT. With the popularity of robotics in both pre-college and introductory programming classes, such an environment has the potential to better accommodate students who are visually impaired. JBricks motivation in addition to its design will be presented.

Eliciting programming challenges faced by developers with visual impairments: exploratory study

Without understanding the programming difficulties faced by developers with visual impairments, the research community cannot begin to work on effective solutions to overcome these potential problems. This paper will describe our initial empirically based study to identify the problems blind software developers face. We analyzed 69 survey responses with blind developers in an effort to identify the aspects that are indeed a challenge to software development. The results indicate a number of difficulties, workarounds, and basis requirements that will serve as domain and stakeholder understand.

An accessible robotics programming environment for visually impaired users

Despite advances in assistive technology, challenges remain in pre-college computer science outreach and university programs for visually impaired students. The use of robotics has been popular in pre-college classrooms and outreach programs, including those that serve underrepresented groups. This paper describes the specific accessibility features implemented in software that provides an accessible Lego Mindstorms NXT programming environment for teenage students who are visually impaired. JBrick is designed to support students with diverse visual acuity and who use needed assistive technology. Field tests over several days showed that JBrick has the potential to accommodate students who are visually impaired as they work together to program Lego Mindstorms NXT robots.