The Consortium is supporting a wide variety of projects and successfully seekeing extramural funding from the public and private sector. Some of the on-going and recently completed projects include:
The significance of the project is that it can enhance the logical reasoning ability of students, and thus improve the quality of the software they develop after graduation. To make this possible, the project will employ an integrated system of engaging interactive reasoning guides to help overcome individual and collective learning obstacles. These guides will facilitate incremental learning for students and incremental adoption for educators. The automation inherent in the guides will make them an ideal vehicle for impacting learning in personalized and online settings and for reaching a diverse audience.
The project goals include enabling students to reason correctly about code compositions on all valid inputs, pinpointing fine-grain learning obstacles using a logical reasoning approach aided by an automated verification engine, and tailoring the tutoring necessary to help students overcome those obstacles. The scope includes common code idioms from the introductory programming repertoire and more advanced component-based software engineering concepts such as contracts. The underlying verification engine makes it possible for the interactive guides to offer a class of learner activities and directed logical feedback not possible with standard IDEs such as Eclipse.
Important dates:
A 2013 report from a joint committee of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and the US. National Science Foundation (NSF), Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development (NSF 13-126) describes shared understandings of the roles of various types of research in generating evidence about strategies and interventions for increasing student learning. They identify six types of research:
For each type of research, the guidelines characterize the elements of such research: purpose, required theoretical and empirical justifications, expectations for research design and expected products, and expectations for review.
In this NSF-funded workshop we seek to explore the space of successful CS Education Research projects conducted by ICER attendees, identify exemplars in each of the six categories, and discuss how best to disseminate these guidelines to current and prospective researchers in the field. Outcomes of the workshop will include:
Workshop attendees will be asked to present and describe their past or current research project in terms of the elements in the guidelines (purpose, justifications, design, products, etc.) and to participate in discussions on how to promote the guidelines to prospective researchers.