Program

The Doctoral Consortium will provide a forum for those undertaking Doctoral studies in any area of Computing Education to network with other PhD students in the area, to get advice on their PhD progress from experienced academics in the area of Computing Education, and to potentially identify some new collaborators for their research. Each doctoral symposium participant will be asked to give a short presentation on their PhD topic, progress to date, and their current plan to completion. This will be briefly critiqued by another student in the audience, and then will be discussed among all participants with a view to constructive feedback, advice and support.

The Consortium will be chaired by Prof. John Grundy, a very experienced supervisor (over 20 PhD students and over 30 Masters by research students), a researcher in Software Engineering, and also an experienced educator and educational researcher. We will have 2-3 other experienced PhD supervisors and computing education researchers as panel members, along with a recent PhD graduate to share their experiences of building a research profile during and after PhD studies.

While interest in computer science degrees has declined, interest in computer science continues to grow across campus. Some estimates suggest that by 2012 there will be some 13 million end-user programmers in the United States, compared to an estimated 3 million professional software developers.

In this talk, Mark argues for more attention to that much greater number, for having an impact by making more successful the non-professional who uses computer science. Mark will present historical evidence that our field has had a goal of teaching the non-professionals about computer science for over 40 years, and recent evidence that end-user programmers want what we have to offer, and that we need to develop new kinds of classes and new kinds of approaches to teaching CS to meet their needs.

Mark will present methods for teaching computing that have improved success rates for non-computing majors (while still including programming), such as contextualized computing education.

Learning at its best is a significant activity transforming students' understanding, and even changing them as people. Despite requiring considerable time and effort it can be immensely enjoyable and rewarding - think of a child learning to walk or to talk, a gamer working to master Minecraft or Portal.

Why then do my students regard university as a workhouse? Why do they see assignments as burdens and chores, lectures and other formal classes as obligations to be endured? This makes teaching hard - fighting uphill - and learning too. Do teaching and learning have to be that hard?

Both we and our students were drawn to this wonderful discipline because of the pleasure it gives us. In this address I'll describe some practical ways we can make use of this to improve teaching and learning. I'll give case studies of ways in which we've used Gamification and related ideas with some success. We'll also discuss blurring the line between online and traditional face-to-face courses and how each mode can benefit from adopting features from the other.