Timothy T. Yuen

Collaborative Robotics Projects for Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

This study examines the levels of social interaction of students with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders during collaborative robotics projects. An alternating treatments design was used to observe the duration of social interaction of two middle school children with autism spectrum disorders across robotics and nonrobotics instruction as well as structured versus nonstructured activities. Results show that both participants with autism spectrum disorders engaged in higher levels of social interaction during robotics instruction when compared with nonrobotics instruction sessions. However, one participant displayed significantly higher levels of social interaction during nonstructured activities, indicating that the instructional setting may serve as a conditioned punisher for the students social interactions.

Novices' knowledge construction of difficult concepts in CS1

This cognitive study examines how students come to know and apply what they learn in a CS1 course. Students were asked to solve problems involving three difficult concepts in CS1 in clinical interviews. Data show diverse forms of knowledge (automatic, associate, and conceptual) and their application (need to code, generalizing, and efficiency) in problem solving. This study was funded by the SIGCSE Special Projects grant.

Increasing participation from underrepresented minorities in STEM through robotics clubs

This paper describes our teams efforts in designing and establishing after-school robotics clubs throughout the San Antonio area in order to increase Hispanic participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. We discuss our model of informal learning environments for motivating minority children from linguistically and culturally diverse populations as well as the implementation plan used for partnering with schools to start after-school robotics clubs.

Investigation of Social Networks and Discussions in STEM Education Communities on Twitter

With the increasing importance of STEM education and the popularity of micro blogging, it becomes important to study the nature of the social network within STEM education in order to observe how members of that community work together. A social network analysis (SNA) was conducted to examine the nature of the STEM education community and its key players on Twitter. The findings from the SNA will show: categories of the key players in this social network, to what extent a community exists on the Twitter platform, and the types of interactions that users contribute to the community, and kinds of information being discussed.

Scrumming with Educators: Cross-Departmental Collaboration for a Summer Software Engineering Capstone

This paper describes the design of a 10-week summer software engineering capstone course that provides a service learning opportunity through cross-departmental collaboration. The projects for this course centered on developing software products to support education faculty in their work in the greater university area. This paper will also discuss how Scrum was implemented over a 10-week summer semester, the outcomes and challenges of cross-departmental collaboration, the types of projects created for education faculty, and the advantages of connecting software engineering capstone courses with education faculty.

Examining the Design of Media-Rich Cognitive Tools as Scaffolds in a Multimedia Problem-Based Learning Environment

This chapter examines the various cognitive tools embedded in a multimedia-enriched PBL environment for middle school science known as Alien Rescue and shares the research findings of the use of these cognitive tools in assisting young learners’ problem solving. The goal of this chapter is to illustrate strategies for designing media-rich cognitive tools to support learning.

Embedded experts for undergraduate engineering faculty professional development

This paper presents a work in progress of our universitys initiative aimed at improving undergraduate engineering education through faculty professional development. This professional development is based on continual mentoring and course transformation through embedded education experts paired with engineering faculty. Through such transformative teaching practices, this initiative seeks to increase student achievement, interest, and retention in engineering, particularly with students from underrepresented minority groups.

STEM conversations in social media: Implications on STEM education

This paper investigated conversations in social media on STEM over the course of a year to find who are the most important people that may influence STEM education discussions as well as the trends in the topics of conversations. The findings reveal that the most influential users represent organizations (businesses and non-profits relating to STEM fields and STEM education), although facilitation of such conversations are influenced by individuals. Further, the trends in conversations largely center on topics, such as K-12 and graduate studies, engaging K-12 STEM practices, specific STEM disciplines, and STEM careers.

Designing Teacher Professional Development Workshops for Robotics Integration across Elementary and Secondary School Curriculum

This paper describes the design of a professional development workshop on integrating robotics at the elementary and secondary school curriculum. The workshop was designed to support STEM education through teacher education at the university and post-university level. Moreover, the workshop leveraged the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and an interdisciplinary approach to engage teachers with robotics. The workshops design and implementation highlights the affordances of an interdisciplinary approach for attracting a greater diversity of teachers across all content areas to provide students with educational robotics activities.

A User Space-based Project for Practicing Core Memory Management Concepts

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a novel project designed to facilitate the learning of memory management concepts and interactions between different components. This project removes the complexity of a full or specific operating system by implementing memory management inside the user space. Evaluation results show that the mean exam scores improved by about 29% to 34%. On average, the total code size is less than 300 lines and time spent working on this project is under 17 hours. Therefore, this project is beneficial in helping students learn memory management while maintaining a reasonable project workload.