Papers by Andrew Luxton-reilly
This year we tried a new mode of teaching for a 6 week long CS2 summer school course, which was a... more This year we tried a new mode of teaching for a 6 week long CS2 summer school course, which was almost entirely based on a flexible, self-managed learning approach. Apart from weekly class meetings and some meetings with individuals, there was no direct communication between the students and the lecturers. The students had to manage their time and learn the
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the NZ Chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction on ZZZ - CHINZ '10, 2010
StudySieve is an online tool in which students create and share assessment questions with their p... more StudySieve is an online tool in which students create and share assessment questions with their peers. The submitted questions can be answered, and all answers are visible to the entire community. Both the questions and answers are evaluated by students in a double-blind peer review process. This pedagogy, known as constructive evaluation, has been previously studied in the context of
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education - ITiCSE '13, 2013
ABSTRACT We know that students solve problems in different ways, but we know little about the kin... more ABSTRACT We know that students solve problems in different ways, but we know little about the kinds of variation, or the degree of variation between these student generated solutions. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that classifies the variation between correct student solutions in objective terms, and we show how the application of the taxonomy provides instructors with additional insight about the differences between student solutions. This taxonomy may be used to inform instructors in selecting examples of code for teaching purposes, and provides the possibility of automatically applying the taxonomy to existing solution sets.
Proceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education - ITiCSE '12, 2012
Identifying and correcting syntax errors is a challenge all novice programmers confront. As educa... more Identifying and correcting syntax errors is a challenge all novice programmers confront. As educators, the more we understand about the nature of these errors and how students respond to them, the more effective our teaching can be. It is well known that just a few types of errors are far more frequently encountered by students learning to program than most. In this paper, we examine how long students spend resolving the most common syntax errors, and discover that certain types of errors are not solved any more quickly by the higher ability students. Moreover, we note that these errors consume a large amount of student time, suggesting that targeted teaching interventions may yield a significant payoff in terms of increasing student productivity.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
ABSTRACT Traditionally, learning resources are created by an instructor and distributed to their ... more ABSTRACT Traditionally, learning resources are created by an instructor and distributed to their students. A contributing-student pedagogy (CSP) is one in which this responsibility shifts, placing students in control of creating the resources and sharing them with their peers. Technology plays a central role in supporting the collection and distribution of student-generated resources. Although many CSP tools have the potential to be widely adopted, they have predominantly been applied in a local context and rarely extended to other contexts or institutions. Moreover, the use of CSP (i.e. students contributing to the learning of others) is almost never seen in cross-institutional contexts. In this article, we discuss the novel application of CSP across multiple institutions and countries, reporting on an activity in which first-year programming students in New Zealand generate learning resources for their counterparts in Canada. With the increasing adoption of Web 2.0 tools in education, such cross-institutional learning activities have the potential to become more widespread and we report here on our challenges and successes. We find that a cross-institutional approach can work as well as within-institution CSP, with students at both institutions preferring their contributions to be shared more widely.
ABSTRACT We devised and tested two new visual guides to help users comprehend distorted sketched ... more ABSTRACT We devised and tested two new visual guides to help users comprehend distorted sketched information in magnification lenses. Distortion techniques, such as fisheye lenses, have the advantage of magnifying information without occluding the surrounding content. However distorted information in the transition region requires extra mental workload to understand: this can lead to frustration and rejection of magnification lenses. Our evaluation shows any visual guide is better than none and identifies strengths and weaknesses of the new guides. We tested for the four visual properties important for understanding distorted information: scale, alignment, distance and direction. Surprisingly grids are not as effective in many contexts as our new lenses.
Large test banks of multiple choice questions (MCQs) are popular resources for students wishing t... more Large test banks of multiple choice questions (MCQs) are popular resources for students wishing to quickly learn course material. However, they are time consuming to create and offer a somewhat limited learning experience.
ABSTRACT We describe the design of a web-based interactive learning environment that guides stude... more ABSTRACT We describe the design of a web-based interactive learning environment that guides students' learning of visual aesthetics. With aesthetics, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. However, initially we take an element-by-element approach that aligns well to the SOLO Taxonomy and software components. Using the colour element as an exemplar, we trialled our online learning environment with 36 undergraduate students undertaking a Human-Computer Interaction course. The results suggest that students enjoy and engage in the process, indicating the potential of our structured approach to learning visual aesthetics within Human Computer Interaction education.
We report on a study comparing peer feedback with feedback written by tutors on a large, undergra... more We report on a study comparing peer feedback with feedback written by tutors on a large, undergraduate software engineering programming class. Feedback generated by peers is generally held to be of lower quality to feedback from experienced tutors, and this study sought to explore the extent and nature of this difference. We looked at how seriously peers undertook the reviewing task, differences in the level of detail in feedback comments and differences with respect to tone (whether comments were positive, negative or neutral, offered advice or addressed the author personally). Peer feedback was also compared by academic standing, and by gender. We found that, while tutors wrote longer comments than peers and gave more specific feedback, in other important respects (such as offering advice) the differences were not significant.
Proceedings of the 2010 ITiCSE working group reports on Working group reports - ITiCSE-WGR '10, 2010
Activities that require students to collaborate, share solutions, review each others' work, or cr... more Activities that require students to collaborate, share solutions, review each others' work, or create materials explicitly for the use of other students have been shown to be beneficial not only to students' learning of the material, but to their reflective, critical and creative skills. This paper presents a snap-shot of tools currently reported as being used to support such collaborative activities in Computer Science education. Basing our analysis on an extensive review of recent Computer Science Education literature, we categorize these tools according to both their form and use while identifying gaps, limitations and opportunities.
Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education - ITiCSE '10, 2010
Students in a large introductory programming course were asked twice to predict their scores on t... more Students in a large introductory programming course were asked twice to predict their scores on the final exam: once at the beginning of a six-week module, and once at the end. In between, students in only one of the two lecture streams recorded subjective confidence in their answers to individual questions on weekly quizzes. Students' predictions were moderately correlated with their scores. Students who attended more quizzes had not only higher exam scores, but improved their predictions more than those who attended fewer quizzes. Practice recording confidence on individual quiz questions did not yield significantly more improvement in exam predictions. Several findings from previous work are confirmed, including that women were significantly more underconfident than men.
Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education - ITiCSE '11, 2011
Although a number of existing systems support student-generated multiple choice questions, such q... more Although a number of existing systems support student-generated multiple choice questions, such questions tend to focus on lower-order cognitive skills. Free response questions are frequently used to evaluate higher-order thinking, but supporting student-generated free-response questions is challenging. StudySieve is a web-based tool that extends student-generated questions to the free-response domain. We report on the use of StudySieve for reviewing core content in three large undergraduate Computer Science courses. Students produce more content than required, provide feedback to their peers and report that they learn from question authoring, question answering, seeing the answers produced by their peers and evaluating those answers.
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education - SIGCSE '12, 2012
Recent interest in student-centric pedagogies have resulted in the development of numerous tools ... more Recent interest in student-centric pedagogies have resulted in the development of numerous tools that support student generated questions. Previous evaluations of such tools have reported strong correlations between student participation and exam performance, yet the level of student engagement with other learning activities in the course is a potential confounding factor. We show such correlations may be explained by other factors, and we undertake a deeper analysis that reveals evidence of the positive impact questiongeneration activities have on student performance.
Proceeding of the fourth international workshop on Computing education research - ICER '08, 2008
Common exam practice centres around two question types: code tracing (reading) and code writing. ... more Common exam practice centres around two question types: code tracing (reading) and code writing. It is commonly believed that code tracing is easier than code writing, but it seems obvious that different skills are needed for each. These problems also differ in their value on an exam. Pedagogically, code tracing on paper is an authentic task whereas code writing on paper is less so. Yet, few instructors are willing to forgo the code writing question on an exam. Is there another way, easier to grade, that captures the "problem solving through code creation process" we wish to examine? In this paper we propose Parson's puzzle-style problems for this purpose. We explore their potential both qualitatively, through interviews, and quantitatively through a set of CS1 exams. We find notable correlation between Parsons scores and code writing scores. We find low correlation between code writing and tracing and between Parsons and tracing. We also make the case that marks from a Parsons problem make clear what students don't know (specifically, in both syntax and logic) much less ambiguously than marks from a code writing problem. We make recommendations on the design of Parsons problems for the exam setting, discuss their potential uses and urge further investigations of Parsons problems for assessment of CS1 students.
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computing Education Research - Koli '08, 2008
PeerWise is a web-based system that allows multiple-choice question banks to be built solely from... more PeerWise is a web-based system that allows multiple-choice question banks to be built solely from student input. The system provides a number of intrinsic reward structures that encourage students to contribute high-quality questions in the complete absence of instructor moderation. Several opportunities for learning arise, spanning the range from simple drill-and-practice exercises to deep, reflective study. Affective skills are also
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 2009
ABSTRACT Computer games are widely used in programming assignments to motivate students. Traditio... more ABSTRACT Computer games are widely used in programming assignments to motivate students. Traditionally, these have been text-based games such as hangman, but as Java has become widespread, the use of graphics and graphical games has increased correspondingly. We report on a framework used as scaffolding to help students understand how to design and implement a variety of interactive games. We share our experiences using this framework for assignments over a number of years.
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Papers by Andrew Luxton-reilly