ITiCSE 2014: Working Groups Reports #ITiCSE2014 #ITiCSE

Unfortunately, there are too many working groups, reporting at too high a speed, for me to capture it here. All of the working groups are going to release reports and I suggest that you have a look into some of the areas covered. The topics reported on today were:

• Methodology and Technology for In-Flow Peer Review

  In-flow peer review is the review of an exercise as it is going on. Providing elements to review can be difficult as it may encourage plagiarism but there are many benefits to this, which generally justifies the decision to do review. Picking who can review what for maximum benefit is also very difficult.

  We’ve tried to do a lot of work here but it’s really challenging because there are so many possibly right ways.

• Computational Thinking in K-9 Education

  Given that there are national, and localised, definitions of what “Computational Thinking” is, this is challenging to identify. Many K-12 teachers are actually using CT techniques but wouldn’t know to answer “yes” if asked if they were. Many issues in play here but the working group are a multi-national and thoughtful group who have lots of ideas.

  As a note, K-9 refers to Kindergarten to Year 9, not dogs. Just to be clear.

• Increasing Accessibility and Adoption of Smart Technologies for Computer Science Education

  How can you integrate all of the whizz-bang stuff into the existing courses and things that we already use everyday? The working group have proposed an architecture to help with the adoption. It’s a really impressive, if scary, slide but I’ll be interested to see where this goes. (Unsurprisingly, it’s a three-tier model that will look familiar to anyone with a networking or distributed systems background.) Basically, let’s not re-invent the wheel when it comes to using smarter technologies but let’s also find out the best ways to build these systems and then share that, as well as good content and content delivery. Identity management is, of course, a very difficult problem for any system so this is a core concern.

  There’s a survey you can take to share your knowledge with this workgroup. (The feared and dreaded Simon noted that it would be nice if their survey was smarter.) A question from the floor was that, while the architecture was nice and standards were good, what impact would this have on the chalkface? (This is a neologism I’ve recently learned about, the equivalent of the coalface for the educational teaching edge.) This is a good question. You only have to look at how many standards there are to realise that standard construction and standard adoption are two very different beasts. Cultural change is something that has to be managed on top of technical superiority. The working group seems to be on top of this so it will be interesting to see where it goes.

• Strengthening Methodology Education in Computing

  Unsurprisingly, computing is a very broad field and is methodologically diverse. There’s a lot of ‘borrowing’ from other fields, which is a nice way of saying ‘theft’. (Sorry, philosophers, but ontologies are way happier with us.) Our curricular have very few concrete references to methodology, with a couple of minor exceptions. The working group had a number of objectives, which they reduced down to fewer and remove the term methodology. Literature reviews on methodology education are sparse but there is more on teaching research methods. Embarrassingly, the paper that shows up for this is a 2006 report from a working group from this very conference. Oops. As Matti asked, are we really this disinterested in this topic that we forget that we were previously interested in it? The group voted to change direction to get some useful work out of the group. They voted not to produce a report as it was too challenging to repurpose things at this late stage. All their work would be toward annotating the existing paper rather than creating a new one.

  One of the questions was why the previous paper had so few citations, cited 5 times out of 3000 downloads, despite the topic being obviously important. One aspect mentioned is that CS researchers are a separate community and I reiterated some early observations that we have made on the pathway that knowledge takes to get from the CS Ed community into the CS ‘research’ community. (This summarises as “Do CS Ed research, get it into pop psychology, get it into the industrial focus and then it will sneak into CS as a curricular requirement, at which stage it will be taken seriously.” Only slightly tongue-in-cheek.)

• A Sustainable Gamification Strategy for Education

  Sadly, this group didn’t show up, so this was disbanded. I imagine that they must have had a very good reason.

Interesting set of groups – watch for the reports and, if you use one, CITE IT! 🙂