The IT in Computer Science Education conference
(ITiCSE) is an ACM
organised conference which looks at the use of
technology in Computer Science Education.
It took place in Helsinki on Jul 11-14
Bias: My interests were introductory programming, Java and web-based testing. Naturally this influenced the papers I saw and this report.
Although this was an educational conference it was refreshingly free of education-type jargon. Most papers would have been accessible to an educated lay person. There were strong opinions on issues such as the appropriate first language to use, the efficiency of online testing, what to do when plagiarism is detected etc. Incidently on the correct introductory language, C++ did not figure for most people interested in Education. Some argued for Ada, but Java seems to be by far the most popular language (Introductory book sales in Java far outnumber all other languages.)
The highlights were
Andreas Zellor got his students to read each other's code. On a freshman programming course, students submitted their program to Praktomat (only available in german) which accepted or rejected a program based on output. When a program was accepted, it would then be marked by an instructor. The instructor only had to mark programs which worked, which was an easy task. (Because they did not have to wonder if it worked, merely how it worked.)
Andreas also said that programs which met the precise specifications were of a much higher quality. (As compared to nearly working programs from previous years without using the system.)
When Students had correctly submitted the program they could elect to review other students' programs. Each time they reviewed a program they were eligable to be reviewed by other students. Reviewing was optional, but students who reviewed and were themselves reviewed did better than students who didn't.
The Animal Algorithm Animation tool. This is a sripting language and environment that allows users to nicely animate algorithms. It is language independent. It can be downloaded at http://www.informatik.uni-siegen.de/~inf/Software/Animal/index.html
Using animated worlds to teach introductory programming. Very friendly introduction to programming. However, I had a suspicion it would work better with children than undergraduates. See http://www.alice.org.
David Ginat's problems to help students spot regularities in problems.
Combatting the code warrier: Debora Wber-Wulff takes on the boys who hack their code into submission. The techniques she uses are
See the course plan.
Tony Greening had very pretty slides and showed us an addictive if fishy student applet. (Unfortunately he didn't give us a URL.)
CS0 and Java Assignments discusses a CS0 course and the materials used.
The invited lecture, Radically rethinking CS1 by Lynn Andrea Stein, though I seem to remember reading this stuff on her web site two years ago.
Janet Carter asked students what their understanding of plagiarism was. Interestingly, if they copied code but understood it then they had done nothing naughty (in their opinion). From the poster "The fact that the plagiarism detector used by the lecturer has highlighted non-coincidental similarities in two solutions does not make the students think they are doing wrong, rather that the system is unfair."
David Gries is developing an interactive book (on CDROM) to teach introductory programming via Java.
I learnt about MOSS An online system to detect program plagiarism.
See also the report on last year's ITiCSE