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Show Me The Code
One of our graduating seniors shared the below blog post with me, and I shared it with all the faculty who teach the lower division courses in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. Andrew makes the...
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Heading to International Computing Education Research 2011 in Rhode Island:...
I’m heading out Sunday for the 2011 International Computing Education Research (ICER) Workshop, hosted by Dr. Kate Sanders at Rhode Island College in Providence. The schedule is exciting — we have a...
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OSS is led by an “elitist circle,” and newcomers don’t get access
There are efforts to engage undergraduates in open-source software development as a form of service learning, to be part of a developer community, or as a way to gain experience with significant code...
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MOOCing an analogy between teachers and John Henry: But maybe it’s students?
I wrote my monthly Blog@CACM piece this last weekend, which was a synthesis of several pieces I wrote here: About the worked examples that I’m trying out in Oxford, the PixelSpreadsheet, and...
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Are MOOC Students Cheating Or Mastering the Material? « Gödel’s Lost Letter...
I hadn’t heard about this form of cheating in MOOC’s. I knew that answers got passed around (as Dave Patterson reported in June), but was surprised to hear that students were creating multiple account...
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A Question that Everyone should Ask their CS Professors: Why do we have to...
There’s a meme going around my College these days, about the 10 questions you should never ask your professor (linked below). Most of them are spot-on (e.g., “Did we do anything important while I was...
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Brief Trip Report on ICER 2012: Answering the global needs for computing...
ICER 2012 in Auckland, New Zealand, was notable for having the highest number of submitted papers to any ICER (8th year) and almost as many attendees as last year, despite being a long way for all the...
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New NSF Initiative: Graduating 10,000 New Engineers and Computer Scientists
Interesting new initiative between the White House and NSF to increase the number of graduates in computing and engineering by focusing on retention. (I strongly agree, because retention is where we’ve...
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Choices aren’t Decisions: Implications of Hewner’s Theory of CS Major’s...
Mike Hewner successfully passed his PhD dissertation defense on Friday. There are just some dissertation tweaks and bureaucracy to go. In the process of the defense, there were several really...
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Stanford’s Most Popular Major Is Now Computer Science (#CSedWeek Fact)
The last paragraph of this is interesting. Yes, Engineering and Computer Science (in particular) are booming, but not everywhere, and it’s not evident to everyone. I was just at Tufts on Monday,...
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Percent of women graduates BS in CS: National, UW, GT
In the context of David Notkin’s receipt of the 2013 Computing Research Association A. Nico Habermann Award for outstanding contributions to supporting underrepresented groups in the computing...
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Computer science enrollments soared last year, rising 30% – Computerworld
The growth of departments in the Taulbee report is astonishing, but what Computerworld got wrong is calling it “computer science enrollments,” as opposed to “computer science enrollments in...
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Google Finally Admits That Its Infamous Brainteasers Were Completely Useless...
Google has found that being great at puzzles doesn’t lead to being a good employee. They also found that GPA’s aren’t good predictors either. Nathan Ensmenger could have told them that. His history...
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Colleges Fight to Retain Interest of STEM Majors: Computing, too
This is our problem in computing, too. If students have never seen a computer science course before coming to college, they won’t know what hits them when they walk in the door. Experts estimate that...
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CS/IT higher-ed degree production has declined since 2003
I couldn’t believe this when Mark Miller sent the below to me. ”Maybe it’s true in aggregate, but I’m sure it’s not true at Georgia Tech.” I checked. And yes, it has *declined*. In 2003 (summing...
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Study finds choice of major most influenced by quality of intro professor:...
These results seem consistent with Mike Hewner’s thesis results. If a student likes her intro course more, they are more likely to take that major. Students use how much they enjoy the course as a...
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Lessons Learned From First Year College MOOCs at Georgia Tech (and SJSU)
Karen Head has finished her series on how well the freshman-composition course fared (quoted and linked below), published in The Chronicle. The stats were disappointing — only about 238 of the...
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Researchers cast doubt about early warning systems’ effect on retention
CS researchers have long been interested in what predicts success in introductory computing, e.g., the “camel has two humps” paper, and the Bennedsen and Caspersen review of the literature. Would...
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Shortage in the IT U.S. labor market? Or just a lack of graduates?
Is the shortage of STEM graduates a myth, as IEEE has been arguing recently? Is the case for IT different than the case for STEM overall? I found the analysis linked below interesting. Most IT...
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The Joy of Teaching Computer Science in the Age of Facebook: Interview with...
Great interview with Stanford’s Mehran Sahami. I think he has his finger on what’s influencing students going into CS today. And now a lot more students everywhere are choosing to major in computer...
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