Latice 2013: Papers Accepted!

We are very excited to have had three papers accepted for Latice 2013 – the First International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering, which is being held in Macau in March.

Rebecca Vivian has been working on analysing online collaborations in the context of exploring cognitive and metacognitive behaviours within online collaboration environments. This work explores a case study of a PBL-based collaborative exercise using the Piazza system – enabling both insight into the co-construction of a wiki-based assignment response, and the parallel discussion by the students in constructing their response. Rebecca explores a quantitative analysis of behaviour frequencies combined with a qualitative analysis of the student interactions to determine the extent that students’ cognitive and metacognitive behaviours are evident in the discussion, which provides insight into how we can better assess and understand collaborative knowledge construction.

Nick Falkner’s paper presents a discussion on the issues behind the adoption of computer science education research more broadly within the computer science educator community, and why ideas seem to be delayed in being more broadly adopted. Nick explores this question in terms of placing computer science education as threshold concept, and what that means for how we might change our communication practices.

And finally, my own paper is exploring how students’ understand the software development process in terms of a neo-Piagetian model. In this work, we analyse students’ reflections on their software development process throughout a final year introductory programming course according to a neo-Piagetian framework. This enables us to identify aspects of “magical thinking” that illustrate immature mental models of the software development process, and gives us insights into how we might better define and explain the software development process to new students.

N. Falkner, K. Falkner and R. Vivian, Computer Science Education: the First Threshold Concept. Accepted for the First International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering (LATICE 2013), March 2013.

R. Vivian, K. Falkner and N. Falkner, Behind the scenes: students’ cognitive and metacognitive activities that support the construction of a shared wiki response. Accepted for the First International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering (LATICE 2013), March 2013.

K. Falkner, N. Falkner and R. Vivian, Neo-Piagetian Forms of Reasoning in Software Development Process Construction. Accepted for the First International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering (LATICE 2013), March 2013.