Author Archives: Duncan Hull

Join us to discuss why we teach Computing at School (and University) on Monday 7th April at 2pm BST

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Why do we even bother? What (exactly) is the point? In this age of AI why would anyone need to learn about Computing? What value does it add, what skills do students learn and what knowledge do students actually need to develop? Join us on Monday 7th April at 2pm BST (UTC+1) to discuss a paper co-authored by Sue Sentance and published at iticse.acm.org [1]. From the abstract:

K-12 computing education research is a rapidly growing field of research, both driven by and driving the implementation of computing as a school and extra-curricular subject globally. In the context of discipline-based education research, it is a new and emerging field, drawing on areas such as mathematics and science education research for inspiration and theoretical bases. The urgency around investigating effective teaching and learning in computing in school alongside broadening participation has led to much of the field being focused on empirical research. Less attention has been paid to the underlying philosophical assumptions informing the discipline, which might include a critical examination of the rationale for K-12 computing education, its goals and perspectives, and associated inherent values and beliefs. In this working group, we conducted an analysis of the implicit and hidden values, perspectives and goals underpinning computing education at school in order to shed light on the question of what we are talking about when we talk about K-12 computing education. To do this we used a multi-faceted approach to identify implicit rationales for K-12 computing education and examine what these might mean for the implemented curriculum. Methods used include both traditional and natural language processing techniques for examining relevant literature, alongside an examination of the theoretical literature relating to education theory. As a result we identified four traditions for K-12 computing education: algorithmic, design-making, scientific and societal. From this we have developed a framework for the exemplification of these traditions, alongside several potential use cases. We suggest that while this work may provoke some discussion and debate, it will help researchers and others to identify and express the rationales they draw on with respect to computing education.

We’ll be joined by one of the papers co-authors, Sue Sentance from the University of Cambridge.  Sue is Director of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, recipient of the BCS Lovelace medal and an editor of the book Computer Science Education: Perspectives on Teaching and Learning in School published by Bloomsbury Academic. Sue will give us a lightning talk on the paper which is also summarised on the computing education research blog.

All welcome, meeting URL is public at zoom.us/j/96465296256, password is private and pinned in the slack channel which you can join by following the instructions at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Carsten Schulte, Sue Sentance, Sören Sparmann, Rukiye Altin, Mor Friebroon-Yesharim, Martina Landman, Michael T. Rücker, Spruha Satavlekar, Angela Siegel, Matti Tedre, Laura Tubino, Henriikka Vartiainen, J. Ángel Velázquez-Iturbide, Jane Waite and Zihan Wu (2024) What We Talk About When We Talk About K-12 Computing Education Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2024), Pages 226 – 257 DOI:10.1145/3689187.37096

Join us to discuss team based capstone projects on Monday 3rd February at 2pm UTC

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There is no “I” in Team, but there is an “I” in University. Teamwork is a core skill taught in many Computing degrees. How can instructors help students improve their teamwork skills though collaborative projects? Join us on Zoom to discuss a paper investigating teamwork skills in the context of capstone projects published in ITiCSE iticse.acm.org [1]. From the abstract

Team-based capstone courses are integral to many undergraduate and postgraduate degree programs in the computing field. They are designed to help students gain hands-on experience and practice professional skills such as communication, teamwork, and self-reflection as they transition into the real world. Prior research on capstone courses has focused primarily on the experiences of students. The perspectives of instructors who teach capstone courses have not been explored comprehensively. However, an instructor’s experience, motivation, and expectancy can have a significant impact on the quality of a capstone course. In this working group, we used a mixed methods approach to understand the experiences of capstone instructors. Issues such as class size, industry partnerships, managing student conflicts, and factors influencing instructor motivation were examined using a quantitative survey and semi-structured interviews with capstone teaching staff from multiple institutions across different continents. Our findings show that there are more similarities than differences across various capstone course structures. Similarities include team size, team formation methodologies, duration of the capstone course, and project sourcing. Differences in capstone courses include class sizes and institutional support. Some instructors felt that capstone courses require more time and effort than regular lecture-based courses. These instructors cited that the additional time and effort is related to class size and liaising with external stakeholders, including industry partners. Some instructors felt that their contributions were not recognized enough by the leadership at their institutions. Others acknowledged institutional support and the value that the capstone brought to their department. Overall, we found that capstone instructors were highly intrinsically motivated and enjoyed teaching the capstone course. Most of them agree that the course contributes to their professional development. The majority of the instructors reported positive experiences working with external partners and did not report any issues with Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) or disputes about Intellectual Property (IP). In most institutions, students own the IP of their work, and clients understand that. We use the global perspective that this work has given us to provide guidelines for institutions to better support capstone instructors.

We’ll be joined by one of the co-authors Steve Riddle from Newcastle University, who will give us a lightning talk summary to kick-off our discussion. All welcome, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Sara Hooshangi, Asma Shakil, Subhasish Dasgupta, Karen C. C. Davis, Mohammed Farghally, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, Mirela Gutica, Ryan Hardt, Steve Riddle, Mohammed Seyam (2025) Instructors’ Perspectives on Capstone Courses in Computing Fields: A Mixed-Methods Study ITiCSE 2024: 2024 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, DOI:10.1145/3689187.3709608

Send us your SIGCSE journal club paper suggestions by 10th January 2025

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Our next meeting will be at Computing Education Practice (CEP) in Durham on 7th January, if you’re joining us, we’ll see you there. cepconference.webspace.durham.ac.uk

CC BY licensed picture of Durham School in Snow by Teach46 on Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/CTqo

If you can’t make it to Durham this year (registration closed last week), our next UK ACM SIGCSE journal club meeting is on the first Monday in February, that’s Monday 3rd February at 2pm GMT (UTC+1). What paper should we discuss? Send us your suggestions by all the usual channels:

… by 5pm GMT on Friday 10th January 2025.

In the meantime, we wish all our readers and club members a happy holiday and prosperous new year.

Join us on to discuss why LLM-enhanced Programming Error Messages are Ineffective in Practice on Monday 2nd December at 2pm GMT (UTC)

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Large Language Models (LLMs) can help explain programming error messages and these explanations tend to improve as the models they are based on include more source code. However, it is unknown to what extent novice programmers are able to effectively utilise these automatically generated explanations to debug their programs, with tools like GitHub CoPilot and ChatGPT. Join us to discuss a paper on this by Eddie Antonio Santos and Brett Becker. This paper won a best paper award at UKICER.com earlier this year. We’ll be joined by the papers lead author, Eddie Antonio Santos, who’ll give a lightning talk to kick off our discussion. From the abstract:

The sudden emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has had a disruptive impact throughout the computing education community. LLMs have been shown to excel at producing correct code to CS1 and CS2 problems, and can even act as friendly assistants to students learning how to code. Recent work shows that LLMs demonstrate unequivocally superior results in being able to explain and resolve compiler error messages—for decades, one of the most frustrating parts of learning how to code. However, LLM-generated error message explanations have only been assessed by expert programmers in artificial conditions. This work sought to understand how novice programmers resolve programming error messages (PEMs) in a more realistic scenario. We ran a within-subjects study with 𝑛 = 106 participants in which students were tasked to fix six buggy C programs. For each program, participants were randomly assigned to fix the problem using either a stock compiler error message, an expert-handwritten error message, or an error message explanation generated by GPT-4. Despite promising evidence on synthetic benchmarks, we found that GPT-4 generated error messages outperformed conventional compiler error messages in only 1 of the 6 tasks, measured by students’ time-to-fix each problem. Handwritten explanations still outperform LLM and conventional error messages, both on objective and subjective measures.

As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, all welcome, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us.

References

  1. Eddie Antonio Santos and Brett A. Becker (2024) Not the Silver Bullet: LLM-enhanced Programming Error Messages are Ineffective in Practice, UKICER ’24: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research DOI:10.1145/3689535.3689554

Join us to discuss the use of AI in undergraduate programming courses on Monday 4th Nov at 2pm GMT (UTC)

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Students of programming are often encouraged to use AI assistants with little consideration for their perceptions and preferences. How do students perceptions influence their usage of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) in undergraduate programming courses? How does the use of tools like ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot relate to students self-belief in their own programming abilities? Join us to discuss a paper by Aadarsh Padiyath et al about this published at ICER 2024. [1] From the abstract:

The capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate, debug, and explain code has sparked the interest of researchers and educators in undergraduate programming, with many anticipating their transformative potential in programming education. However, decisions about why and how to use LLMs in programming education may involve more than just the assessment of an LLM’s technical capabilities. Using the social shaping of technology theory as a guiding framework, our study explores how students’ social perceptions influence their own LLM usage. We then examine the correlation of self-reported LLM usage with students’ self-efficacy and midterm performances in an undergraduate programming course. Triangulating data from an anonymous end-of-course student survey (n = 158), a mid-course self-efficacy survey (n=158), student interviews (n = 10), self-reported LLM usage on homework, and midterm performances, we discovered that students’ use of LLMs was associated with their expectations for their future careers and their perceptions of peer usage. Additionally, early self-reported LLM usage in our context correlated with lower self-efficacy and lower midterm scores, while students’ perceived over-reliance on LLMs, rather than their usage itself, correlated with decreased self-efficacy later in the course.

There’s also an accompanying article and blog post to go with this paper. [2.3]

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting online joining details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Aadarsh Padiyath, Xinying Hou, Amy Pang, Diego Viramontes Vargas, Xingjian Gu, Tamara Nelson-Fromm, Zihan Wu, Mark Guzdial, Barbara Ericson (2024) Insights from Social Shaping Theory: The Appropriation of Large Language Models in an Undergraduate Programming Course ICER ’24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research – Volume 1, Pages 114 – 130 DOI:10.1145/3632620.3671098 (non-paywalled version at arxiv.org/abs/2406.06451)
  2. Aadarsh Padiyath (2024) Do I have a say in this or has ChatGPT already decided for me? blog post at computinged.wordpress.com
  3. Aadarsh Padiyath (2024) Do I Have a Say in This, or Has ChatGPT Already Decided for Me? XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for students, Volume 31, Issue 1, Pages 52 – 55, DOI:10.1145/3688090 (paywalled version only)

In Memory of Brett Becker

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We are deeply saddened to hear of Brett Becker‘s tragic passing. Brett has been a regular speaker, supporter and attendee at SIGCSE journal club since we started in 2020 and we’ve have often discussed Brett’s papers at SIGCSE journal club. We’d planned to discuss another one of Brett’s papers at our October meetup but we’ve postponed that to a later date, in light of his passing.

Brett was an accomplished researcher and active member of the international computing education research community.  Among his many professional activities and accomplishments, Brett was influential in the sigcse.org community in Europe, America and beyond where he served as vice chair.  He also served as program co-chair at the inaugural ukicer.com conference in 2019, and again in 2022, and served on the UKICER steering committee.  He helped to ensure Ireland was a cornerstone of UKICER, and also co-founded sigcseire.acm.org, the SIGCSE Ireland chapter.  He was an energetic and astute proponent of computing education in Ireland and globally, always a pleasure to work with, and he will be greatly missed.

Plans to honor and remember Brett will be distributed to the SIGCSE-MEMBERS@LISTSERV.ACM.ORG mailing list in due course, this is an open list that anyone can subscribe to.





Join us on 5th & 6th September for UKICER.com in Manchester

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Journal club is taking a break for August, we’ll be back in September for the United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research conference (UKICER.com), 5th & 6th of September in Manchester.


If you’ve any papers you’d like to discuss at future journal clubs, send us your paper nominations via the usual channels, see the nominate details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/papers

Join us to discuss the broken software engineering pipeline on Monday 1st of July at 2pm BST

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Many employers struggle to recruit and retain software engineers with the skills needed to contribute to the modern workplace. What do employers and educators need to do to address this wicked problem? Join us to discuss the broken pipeline problem and its potential solutions in cybersecurity and beyond on Monday 1st July at 2pm BST. We’ll be joined by Shamal Faily and James Sharp from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL – an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Defence – MoD) who will give a lightning talk summary of their paper published at the High Integrity Software Conference (HISC) in 2024. From the abstract:

Industry sectors producing High Integrity software, like Defence and Aerospace, require a consistent and reliable supply of software engineering suitably qualified and experienced persons (SQEP). Much of this SQEP is drawn from UK Computer Science undergraduate programmes. However, these sectors face several challenges meeting the quantity and quality of the desired supply. First, classic but relevant material on Software Engineering is slowly being de-emphasised from Academic Computing programmes, and even removed from specialist programmes such as Cyber Security. For example, at several institutions, modules on Software Engineering have been replaced with more restricted material on Software Design, often delivered in the first year of a degree programme. Second, because of how degree and apprenticeship accreditation criteria are interpreted, foundational topics on software requirements and specifications are delivered inconsistently. On some programmes, user needs and software requirements are considered to be synonymous. On others, material that is covered early in the curriculum is not reinforced in later years, once students begin to encounter non-trivial systems. Third, as Software Engineering is no longer an active area of research in the UK, the SQEP available to deliver best practice and research results in Software Engineering is becoming eroded. This has implications on the ability to teach material such as Model-Driven Software Engineering, but also on what ‘software engineering’ is understood to be. For example, many ICT projects employ agile methods where code is valued over documentation. Software for many critical systems is too complex to reason about independently, and – given the life span of such systems – non-software artefacts are essential for activities like validation, knowledge exchange, and certification. To begin addressing these challenges at scale, we propose three possible solutions. First, we must talk more widely about the Software Engineering SQEP pipeline problem. The more awareness there is of this pipeline problem, the more likely it is different stakeholders will start collaborating to strengthen the pipeline. Second, to halt further erosion of the Software Engineering curricula, degree accreditors need to be prepared to identify and call out anti-patterns in Software Engineering education. This should not be a punitive process, but a vehicle for proposing remediations, albeit as a pre-requisite for continued accreditation. Third, material on software certification should be embodied into the Software Engineering curriculum for all Computer Science course derivatives. Safety and Security is increasing expected by consumers in systems of all shapes and sizes, driven by a need to introduce automation throughout everyday life. Introducing a focus on certification will encourage innovation research and education around how to do this at the same pace as modern software engineering. Moreover, those with cogent knowledge should also be prepared to share it, to ensure a certification curricula can be delivered at scale across all UK HEIs.

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting online joining details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Faily, S and Sharp, J (2024) The Software Engineering SQEP Pipeline Problem: Challenges and Opportunities his-conference.co.uk/session/the-software-engineering-sqep-pipeline-problem-challenges-and-opportunities (slides and abstract available online)

Join us to discuss teaching team collaboration to engineers on Monday 10th June at 2pm BST

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Teamwork makes the dream work, or so the cliché goes. So how do you assess students ability to work together towards shared goals? Teaching students to collaborate in teams (agile or otherwise) is notoriously problematic. Dream work can rapidly descend into a nightmare struggle to motivate the free-riders while restraining the self-appointed dictators. Who gets the credit for what? What did the team agree on exactly? Join us to discuss how to develop students confidence and abilities to collaborate in teams of diverse engineers, from a paper published at ITiCSE. [1] From the Abstract

We had an outdated, unsuitable pair of courses covering software engineering over an academic year, which were rewritten last summer. Out went the plan-driven project approach of GANNT charts, and a belief that ‘better estimates’ would save the day. In came a lightweight focus on a mix of extreme programming and scrum to incrementally, and iteratively build products. The classroom changed too. Out went lecture slides in the classroom, plus self-directed pick and choose practical sessions. In came video-led lectures based on the pandemic experience, experiential learning, and more suitable practical sessions to guide students in what they need know to build their product prototypes.The initial results suggest we are headed in the right direction. It still needs more work, but shows students are developing products more confidently as teams of students.

We’ll be joined by Bruce Scharlau, author of the paper, who’ll give us a five minute lightning talk to kick-off our discussion about teaching team collaboration. All welcome, joining details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us/

References

  1. Scharlau, Bruce (2023). Being Agile in the Software Engineering Classroom: Using Agile Approaches Instead of Plan-driven Approaches. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), pages 583–584, DOI: 10.1145/3587103.3594154

Join us to discuss using agile group projects to develop more employable graduates on Monday 13th May at 2pm BST

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Employers often love academic group projects while students often loathe them. How can Agile group projects be used to develop students skills, both hard technical skills and softer people skills? Join us on Monday 13th May at 2pm BST to discuss a paper on this published by Jordan Allison and his collaborators at the University of Gloucestershire and the University of Bristol in the Journal of Further and Higher Education. [1] From the abstract:

This article presents the usage of Integrated Course Design (ICD) in the design and evaluation of applying agile methodologies within an undergraduate module of study to foster the development of computer science students employability skills. Undergraduate programs of computer science typically follow traditional educational methods which can lead to students unable to connect knowledge learned in class to actual situations and students are often assessed individually, whereas collaborative group projects are more akin to industry practice. The teaching experience reported gives students the opportunity to relate concepts learnt in class to a practical group-based project. Students must meet the requirements of a ‘client’ who will provide feedback and additional challenges for students while following the Agile framework SCRUM. Positive student feedback and module grades 7.70% higher than the department average over a four year period indicates the teaching structure and assessment presented is an effective method to foster the development of technical and soft skills of undergraduate computer science students.

We’ll be joined by the co-authors who will give us a five-minute lightning talk summary of their paper to kick-off our discussion. All welcome, joining details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Jordan Allison, Abu Alam, Luke Gassmann, Gareth Nelson & Kamal Zidan (2024): Fostering the development of computer science graduate employability through agile projects, Journal of Further and Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/0309877X.2024.2340642