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?

Following on from our discussion of ungrading, this month we’ll be discussing pass/fail rates in introductory programming courses. [1] Here is the abstract: Anyone is welcome to join us. As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details. Thanks to Brett Becker and Joseph Allen for this months #paper-suggestions via our slack channel at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com.

The more time students spend thinking about their grades, the less time they spend thinking about their learning. Ungraded (pass or fail) assessment provides an alternative to letter grading (A, B, C etc) which can address this issue.

Peer instruction is a tried and tested technique for teaching popularised by the Harvard physicist Eric Mazur. Join us to discuss the use of peer instruction in introductory computing via a paper by Leo Porter and his collaborators, [1] which won an award from the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium Top Ten Papers of All Time.

Minimal guidance is a popular approach to teaching and learning. This technique advocates teachers taking a back seat to facilitate learning by letting their students get on with it . Minimal guidance comes in many guises including constructivism, discovery learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning, active learning, inquiry-based learning and even lazy teaching.

The use of git is widespread in software engineering, however many novices struggle to get to grips with its complex distributed information model, challenging command line syntax and leaky abstractions. To investigate these pitfalls, we’ll be talking about a paper published by Santiago Perez De Rosso and Daniel Jackson on Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git at OOPSLA. [1] From the abstract: So what’s wrong with git?

Join us on Monday 7th September to discuss using theory in Computing Education Research at 11am. We’ll be talking about a paper [1] by Greg L. Nelson and Amy Ko at the University of Washington: Details of the zoom meeting will be posted on our slack workspace at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com. If you don’t have access to the workspace, send me (Duncan Hull) an email to request an invite to join the workspace.

As Universities transition to online teaching during the global coronavirus pandemic, there’s increasing interest in the use of pre-recorded videos to replace traditional lectures in higher education.

Join us for our next journal club meeting on Monday 6th July at 3pm, the papers we’ll be discussing below come from the #paper-suggestions channel of our slack workspace at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com. Show me the pedagogy!

At our next journal club, on Monday 1st June at 11am, we’ll be discussing blended learning. We’ve picked a paper from “paper suggestions” channel at  uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com. The paper is Preparing for the Digital University, a review commissioned by the Gates Foundation. If you’ve not got access to the workspace yet, ping me or Alcywn Parker and we’ll add you to the group.

ACM SIGCSE Journal Club returns Monday 4th May at 11am. The paper we’re discussing this month is “Relating Natural Language Aptitude to Individual Differences in Learning Programming Languages” by Chantel Prat et al published in Scientific Reports. [1] Here’s the abstract: This experiment … Continue reading →