Tag Archives: covid-19

Join us to discuss the role of storytelling and drama in the lecture theatre on Monday 6th November at 2pm UTC

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All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances. And one teacher in their time plays many parts.

As students watch academic actors enter and exit their lecture theatres on University campuses around the world, what role can drama play in their teaching and learning? How can theatre and storytelling facilitate students understanding of whatever is they are supposed to be learning?

Are we walking shadows and poor players that strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more? Do we tell tales like an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing? In short, how much should teachers embrace theatricality, both amateur and professional, on their respective stages? Can drama and storytelling actually improve students learning and if so, how? 🎭

Join us on Monday 6th November at 2pm UTC for our monthly ACM SIGCSE journal club meetup on zoom to discuss a paper on this topic by David Malan. [1] From the abstract

In Fall 2020, Harvard University transitioned entirely from on-campus instruction to Zoom online. But a silver lining of that time was unprecedented availability of space on campus, including the university’s own repertory theater. In healthier times, that theater would be brimming with talented artisans and weekly performances, without any computer science in sight. But with that theater’s artisans otherwise idled during COVID-19, our introductory course, CS50, had an unusual opportunity to collaborate with the same. Albeit subject to rigorous protocols, including face masks and face shields for all but the course’s instructor, along with significant social distancing, that moment in time allowed us an opportunity to experiment with lights, cameras, and action on an actual stage, bringing computer science to life in ways not traditionally possible in the course’s own classroom. Equipped with an actual prop shop in back, the team of artisans was able to actualize ideas that might otherwise only exist in slides and code. And students’ experience proved the better for it, with a supermajority of students attesting at term’s end to the efficacy of almost all of the semester’s demonstrations. We present in this work the design and implementation of the course’s theatricality along with the motivation therefor and results thereof. And we discuss how we have adapted, and others can adapt, these same moments more modestly in healthier times to more traditional classrooms, large and small.

This paper was presented at the SIGCSE 2023 Technical Symposium in Toronto, a video presentation of the paper is also available below. All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Malan, David J. (2023). Computer Science with Theatricality: Creating Memorable Moments in CS50 with the American Repertory Theater during COVID-19. SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, New York, NY, USA. DOI:10.1145/3545945.3569859 non-paywalled version at cs.harvard.edu/malan/publications/V1fp479-malan.pdf

Join us to discuss sense of belonging in Computer Science on Mon 6th Dec at 2pm GMT

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Students sense of belonging has been shown to be associated with many attributes such as motivation and persistence. But what makes people feel like they belong in Computer Science? Join us on Monday 6th December at 2pm GMT to discuss belonging via a paper by Catherine Mooney and Brett Becker. [1] This won a best paper award at SIGCSE 2021.

[There will be no SIGCSE journal club in November, however, we’ll be back in December as usual.]

Sense of belonging, or belongingness, describes how accepted one feels in their academic community and is an important factor in creating inclusive learning environments. Belongingness is influenced by many factors including: students’ backgrounds and experiences; other people; environments (physical and virtual); academic discipline; external factors such as local, regional, and global issues; and time. 2020 has been dominated by several major events including the COVID-19 pandemic which dramatically impacted education. The Black Lives Matter movement has further raised global awareness of equality, diversity and inclusion not just in society, but in educational contexts. Climate change concerns, and politically charged news are also increasingly affecting our students.

We have been monitoring our undergraduate computing students’ sense of belonging for over three years, providing us with a unique opportunity to gauge recent changes during the pandemic. Our results surprised us. We found statistically significant reductions in the belongingness of students identifying as men as well as those not identifying as being part of a minority. However, investigating intersectionality of self-identified gender and minority status revealed more complicated and nuanced trends, illustrating important shifts in the belongingness of our students that we are only beginning to understand.

There’s a video summary of the paper here:

Video summary of the paper by Catherine Mooney and Brett Becker

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

References

  1. Catherine Mooney and Brett Becker (2021) Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Computing Students’ Sense of Belonging. SIGCSE ’21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March 2021 Pages 612–618 DOI:10.1145/3408877.3432407

Join us to discuss when study turns digital on Monday 2nd August at 2pm BST

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Public domain image of Coronavirus by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins at CDC.gov on Wikimedia commons w.wiki/ycs


The pandemic has accelerated changes to the way we teach and learn. Join us to discuss the Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure: a paper by Vegard Gjerde, Robert Gray, Bodil Holst and Stein Dankert Kolstø on the effects of the pandemic on Physics Education at a Norwegian University. [1]

In March 2020, universities in Norway and many other countries shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The students lost access to classrooms, libraries, study halls, and laboratories. Studying turned digital. Because it is unclear when this pandemic will cease to affect students and because we cannot know whether or when a new pandemic occurs, we need to find ways to improve digital study-life for students. An important step in this direction is to understand the students’ experiences and perspectives regarding how the digitalization affected their study-life both in structured learning arenas and their self-study. Therefore, we interviewed 12 students in an introductory mechanics course at a Norwegian university in June of 2020. Through a thematic analysis, we identified four broad categories in the students’ different experiences and reflections, namely that digitalization: (a) provides benefits, e.g. the flexibility inherent in online video lectures; (b) incurs learning costs, e.g. students reducing their study effort; (c) incurs social costs, e.g. missing being around other students; and (d) increases the need for structure, e.g. wanting to be arranged in digital groups to solve mandatory tasks. We also found that the 2019 students on average scored significantly better on the final exam than the 2020 students, d = 0.31, but we discuss why this result should be interpreted with caution. We provide suggestions for how to adapt courses to make students’ digital studying more socially stimulating and effective. Furthermore, this study is a contribution to the historical documentation of the Covid-19 pandemic.

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on Zoom see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details. Thanks to Sarah Clinch for suggesting the paper.

References

  1. Gjerde, Vegard; Gray, Robert; Holst, Bodil; Kolstø, Stein Dankert (2021). “The Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure”. Physics Education. 56 (5): 055004. doi:10.1088/1361-6552/ac031e

Join us to discuss teaching social responsibility and justice in Computer Science on Monday 1st March at 2pm GMT

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Scales of justice icon made by monkik from flaticon.com

With great power comes great responsibility. [1] Given their growing power in the twenty-first century, computer scientists have a duty to society to use that power responsibly and justly. How can we teach this kind of social responsibility and ethics to engineering students? Join us to discuss teaching social justice in computer science via a paper by Rodrigo Ferreira and Moshe Vardi at Rice University in Houston, Texas published in the sigcse2021.sigcse.org conference [2]. From the abstract of the preprint:

As ethical questions around the development of contemporary computer technologies have become an increasing point of public and political concern, computer science departments in universities around the world have placed renewed emphasis on tech ethics undergraduate classes as a means to educate students on the large scale social implications of their actions. Committed to the idea that tech ethics is an essential part of the undergraduate computer science educational curriculum, at Rice University this year we piloted a redesigned version of our Ethics and Accountability in Computer Science class. This effort represents our first attempt at implementing a “deep” tech ethics approach to the course.

Incorporating elements from philosophy of technology, critical media theory, and science and technology studies, we encouraged students to learn not only ethics in a “shallow” sense, examining abstract principles or values to determine right and wrong, but rather looking at a series of “deeper” questions more closely related to present issues of social justice and relying on a structural understanding of these problems to develop potential socio-technical solutions. In this article, we report on our implementation of this redesigned approach. We describe in detail the rationale and strategy for implementing this approach, present key elements of the redesigned syllabus, and discuss final student reflections and course evaluations. To conclude, we examine course achievements, limitations, and lessons learned toward the future, particularly in regard to the number escalating social protests and issues involving Covid-19.

This paper got me thinking:

Houston, we’ve had your problem!

After paging the authors in Houston with the message above there was radio silence.

Beep - beep - beep [white noise] Beep - beep - beep...

Hello Manchester, this is Houston, Can we join you?

So we’re delighted to be joined LIVE by the authors of the paper Rodrigo Ferreira and Moshe Vardi from Houston, Texas. They’ll give a lightning talk outlining the paper before we discuss it together in smaller break out groups.

Their paper describes a problem everyone in the world has had in teaching ethics in Computer Science recently. How can we make computing more ethical?

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

References

  1. Spider-Man (1962) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_responsibility
  2. Rodrigo Ferreira and Moshe Vardi (2021) Deep Tech Ethics An Approach to Teaching Social Justice in Computer Science in Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’21), March 13–20, 2021, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI:10.1145/3408877.3432449
  3. Jack Swigert (1970) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston,_we_have_a_problem