It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (COVID-19 edition)

Conference presentations usually focus on successful innovations: new ideas that yield significant improvements to current practice. Yet we often learn more from failure than from success. In this panel, we present five case studies of "good ideas" for improving CS education (most related to the COVID-19 pandemic) that didn't go as planned. Each contributor will describe their "good idea", the situation that resulted, and wider lessons for the CS community.

Moving a Bootcamp-Style Computer Science Programme Online: An Experience Report

The Postgraduage Certificate in Information Technology at the University of Auckland is a bootcamp-style transition programme for students without prior programming experience. The programme's part-time variant, designed for working professionals, has traditionally been offered with intensive evening classes, with extensive tutor and instructor support. Spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, our University has moved this part-time variant fully online. Benefits of the online offering include a wider, more inclusive audience and flexibility of student learning schedules. However, it has introduced several pedagogical challenges, including but not limited to how instructors can continue to provide meaningful support, feedback, and student engagement in an online environment. In this paper, we reflect on our experience, analyse qualitative and quantitative feedback such as student evaluations and grades, and provide recommendations for those wishing to undertake a similar transformation in the future. © 2023 ACM.

Evolving a Programming CS2 Course: A Decade-Long Experience Report

Despite instructors' best efforts in designing and delivering any given course, changes are likely required from time to time. This experience report presents the changes made in a second-year programming course for non-computing engineering majors over a decade's worth of effort, and the reasons behind those changes. The changes were often reactive - in response to student feedback. However, many other changes were inspired by the desire to trial new interventions in the hope of strengthening the students' positive experience. In addition to personnel and course content changes, the gradual evolvement included how labs, assignments, and activities were structured and executed. Teaching delivery evolved, along with a number of small-scale interventions that eventually became integral elements of the course. When COVID-19 demanded a sudden shift to online learning, the course was prepared to adapt quickly and successfully. The contributions here come in the form of lessons learned over the past decade: what worked, and what did not. We present the large range of changes - -and their rationales - that are particularly relevant and applicable to programming courses targeting engineering students where the luxury of pedagogically-friendlier programming languages is not possible. © 2023 ACM.

Experience Report on Using WeBWorK in Teaching Discrete Mathematics

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, most university classes were moved to online instruction. This greatly stimulated the need for online learning tools. WeBWorK is an open source online homework system, which has been used extensively in a variety of subjects. However, it has not been widely adopted by the Computer Science education community. In this paper, we discuss our experience using WeBWorK in teaching two large online sections of discrete mathematics. Emphasis is given to how we created randomized and auto-graded problems for many topics. In addition, we summarize student performance and feedback. We conclude with our reflections on using WeBWorK and propose future work for exploring its adaptive learning features. © 2023 ACM.

Experience Report: A Distributed, Hybrid Course to Teach Global Software Engineering Course During a Global Pandemic

In an age of geographically distributed software development teams, international communication skills are becoming ever more important to IT students. During the Covid-19 pandemic, contact and travel restrictions have made it almost impossible for students to gain international experience by spending a semester in a foreign country. One possible solution is to conduct distributed courses in software engineering as a virtual cooperation between two universities. Experiences gained during a hybrid, distributed course on global software engineering are presented. The challenges encountered when coordinating a course that takes place simultaneously in two countries are reported. Feedback from students and professors are discussed and recommendations for future work are derived from these lessons learned. © 2022 ACM.

On-line Meetings for Educating the Minds of Future Safety Engineers during the COVID Pandemic: An Experience Report

World-wide opportunities for “meetings of minds” was the goal of the research of visionaries who contributed to the creation of networked communication systems. During 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutes massively exploited these systems enabling virtual spaces of synchronous and asynchronous meetings among students and among students and teachers. Technology alone, however, is not sufficient. Technological Pedagogical And Content Knowledge (TPACK) and competence are paramount. In this paper, I report about my experience in pedagogically designing and implementing an on-line version of an advanced master course on safety-critical systems engineering, conceived and delivered as a series of Zoom-based, and Community-Of-Inquiry (COI)-oriented meetings plus Canvas-based threads of discussions for educating the minds of future safety and software engineers. I also report about the limited but still talkative COI-specific questionnaire-based evaluation, conducted with the purpose of better understanding the limits of moving the course on line and elicit areas of improvement, given that likely education on-line is now here to stay. Finally, I elaborate on a roadmap for future development, based on the results from the first instance. Copyright © 2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

Revealing Agile Mindset Using LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®: Experience from an Online Agile Training Project

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) is an effective methodology to enable the representation of concepts and has been applied to teach several Software Engineering topics. However, there is limited evidence on how LSP can be used in training on agile mindset, which is the core and central element of agile methods. This paper demonstrates how LSP can be utilized in agile training to reveal the agile mindset of participants. We describe our experience of utilising LSP in an agile training project for local software companies. Since the project was run during the COVID-19 pandemic, we adapted the LSP methodology for online settings, which was not straightforward because face-to-face interactions and tangible objects are key characteristics of LSP. In this experience report, we describe the design of the online LSP workshops and explain how to analyze LSP models to reveal the agile mindset of the participants and to tailor the training accordingly. We also provide evidence of the effectiveness of the LSP methodology in our training project. Drawing upon our experience, we synthesize a set of lessons learned and sketch recommendations for educators who intend to apply LSP in their future endeavours. © 2022 Knowledge Systems Institute Graduate School. All rights reserved.

Open-Source Internships With Industry Mentors

Internships help students connect what they have learned in the classroom to the real world, and students with access to internships are more likely to graduate and secure employment. However, many students are unable to find an internship by the time they graduate. This experience report describes a program where volunteer software engineers mentor students as they work on open-source projects in the summer, offered as an alternative to a traditional internship experience. We catalog the considerations involved in providing an experience similar to a traditional internship, describe our program's design, and provide two years' worth of participant evaluations and career outcomes as a measure of efficacy. The program served mostly undergraduates from non-R1 schools who are underrepresented in technology, and achieved similar educational outcomes to a traditional internship program. Most promisingly, mentors were willing to serve as a professional reference for 80% of students and the number of graduating seniors who secured full-time employment in technology was 7 points higher than average (despite occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic). © 2022 ACM.

Experience Report: Standards-Based Grading at Scale in Algorithms

We report our experiences implementing standards-based grading at scale in an Algorithms course, which serves as the terminal required CS Theory course in our department's undergraduate curriculum. The course had 200-400 students, taught by two instructors, eight graduate teaching assistants, and supported by two additional graders and several undergraduate course assistants. We highlight the role of standards-based grading (SBG) in supporting our students during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude by detailing the successes and adjustments we would make to the course structure. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Managing Data...and Covid An Experience Report

The Covid-19 pandemic presented a vast array of challenges for professors and students the world over. As we navigate Covid's long tail, many challenges remain. Those challenges - nasty as they are - can be recast in a constructive light and imbued with pedagogical significance as practical, common-ground motivational tools for teaching topics in data management. The author has done just that. In addition to teaching on full-time faculty in the Computer Science department at Marist College, he was a key member of their Covid-19 screening team. After designing and implementing data management systems for generating representative samples of the college population for surveillance testing, results tracking, and compliance monitoring, he used those experiences in new, hands-on ways to integrate data management theory with real-world practice in his classes. This experience report - wherein the author explains this journey and notes lessons learned - is an example of how, even once this pandemic has receded fully into the past, experiences like these can provide opportunities for educators to incorporate timely topics into their data management courses. © 2022 ACM.

Assessing the Needs of Mobility Solution for Older Adults Through Living Lab Approach: An Experience Report

Staying mobile is the key to ensuring high quality of life for older adults. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to live and move around independently becomes more critical for the most aging society. While several efforts have been made to invest in mobility solutions to help improve older adults’ mobility, there is still a lack of good practice and guidelines for developing such a niche Information Technology (IT) solution. In this paper, we report our experience of using Living Lab, a design science approach, to assess and capture the needs of mobility solutions for older adults. A semi-structured interview involving 25 older adults was conducted. We identified interesting and practical requirements/functionalities from the participants that might be otherwise overlooked if we followed the traditional software development process. The participants provided valuable feedback to help improve our mobility solution in two main areas, mainly the design and functionality of the application. The findings from this case study can potentially be applied for future work that attempts to address similar problems in the same domain. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

An experience report on how remote device access tools helped mobile developers during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced several changes in the work environment. The main change was the adoption of remote work by software development teams around the globe. This change was significant within the mobile software development field because of its dependency on physical devices to perform tests. Therefore, some companies adopted remote access tools to address this issue, where developers can handle devices online through a server. In this sense, the present work surveyed 62 developers at SIDIA R&D Institute, located in Manaus, Brazil, regarding the usefulness of mobile access tools. The results show that the tools are helpful (62% of employees found them very helpful), even though some developers still prefer to use the physical devices while working from the office. However, the tool promoted collaboration between developers, where users would frequently add new devices to be accessed by others remotely. Thus, although remote access tools cannot replace physical devices, mobile software developers consider them a welcome addition. © 2022 ACM.

An Experience Report on Transitioning to Blended Learning and Portfolio-assessment: a Cross-campus Course in Programming

The transition from traditional to digital teaching has led to several challenges for students and educators under the COVID-19 pandemic. Most universities are experiencing remote online delivery and assessment for the first time, which creates several issues, particularly for delivering courses efficiently and evaluating the outcomes without students compromising academic integrity. In this study, we take a closer look at a cross-campus case in delivering a programming course that switched to digital teaching due to COVID-19. We focus on the transition in assessment forms and the gradual adaptation to portfolio evaluation over two years. This form of assessment is more aligned with the constructive alignment theory, and hence contribute to increased learning outcomes as the students receive feedback along the way. Furthermore, we introduced a task where students had to reflect on the answers and solutions. This reflection note may help the teacher to better understand to which level the student has actually understood the theories and skills applied in the solution, and hence reassure that the solution is produced by the student. Observations from our data provide promising direction that it can increase learning benefits and reduce possibilities or the need for cheating and contributes to increased learning outcomes. However, this form of assessment requires a significant effort from teachers and is both time and resource consuming. © 2022 IEEE.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (COVID-19 edition)

Conference presentations usually focus on successful innovations: new ideas that yield significant improvements to current practice. Yet we often learn more from failure than from success. In this panel, we present five case studies of "good ideas"for improving CS education (most related to the COVID-19 pandemic) that didn't go as planned. Each contributor will describe their "good idea", the situation that resulted, and wider lessons for the CS community. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Developing 21st Century Skills with Project-Based Learning: An Experience Report in the Introductory Course of Software Engineering

In a Project-Based Learning (PBL) environment, students are assigned to work on challenging and complicated projects. This environment suites the setting of teaching software engineering courses. Since software engineering not only requires students to gain practical knowledge but they also need to develop soft skills. These soft skills such as communicating, collaborating, being creative, and critically thinking, are essential in the 21st-century working environment. However, these skills are hard to develop during the pandemic of Covid-19 due to social distancing measurement. This paper presents an experience report of using PBL in an online classroom. We have conducted the self-assessment, in which the student's feedbacks have been summarized into positive, negative, and suggestive responses. These responses indicate that students can gain fundamental knowledge and experience in using soft skills when they learn in the PBL environment. Among various soft skills, we have found that collaboration skill can be improved the most. © 2022 IEEE.

It's Challenging but Doable: Lessons Learned from a Remote Collaborative Coding Camp for Elementary Students

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted many U.S. schools from in-person to remote instruction. While collaborative CS activities had become increasingly common in classrooms prior to the pandemic, the sudden shift to remote learning presented challenges for both teachers and students in implementing and supporting collaborative learning. Though some research on remote collaborative CS learning has been conducted with adult learners, less has been done with younger learners such as elementary school students. This experience report describes lessons learned from a remote after-school camp with 24 elementary school students who participated in a series of individual and paired learning activities over three weeks. We describe the design of the learning activities, participant recruitment, group formation, and data collection process. We also provide practical implications for implementation such as how to guide facilitators, pair students, and calibrate task difficulty to foster collaboration. This experience report contributes to the understanding of remote CS learning practices, particularly for elementary school students, and we hope it will provoke methodological advancement in this important area. © 2022 ACM.

Experience Report on the Use of Breakout Rooms in a Large Online Course

In this paper, we present our experience with the use of breakout rooms in a second year undergraduate Software Design course at a large North American institution. Following the switch to remote instruction during the coronavirus pandemic, we revamped our in-person Software Design course to be delivered as a flipped online course, making extensive use of in-lecture exercises completed during breakout rooms. We report on the structure and logistics of this lecture design (for a large class of 300+ students). To gain insights into the impact of the use of breakout rooms on student experience, we conducted weekly student surveys asking for feedback on the lectures and specifically on the use of breakout rooms. Although many students had positive feelings regarding the use of breakout rooms, a significant percentage of students (an average of 47% of the survey responses each week) expressed negative feelings toward them. In an end-of-term survey, we specifically asked students about what they felt worked best for breakout rooms in terms of group size and pre-assigned versus randomized groups, and if there were any other areas that they felt needed improvement. Some of the patterns we observed were that most students liked smaller groups (2-5 people), preferred staying in the same group throughout the semester, and enjoyed the use of breakout rooms as long as others in their room were active participants. We share the details of these survey results as well as the tips and lessons that we learned through this experience. © 2022 ACM.

Building Common Ground: An Inter-Institutional Computing Engineering Education Transfer Learning Community

This experience report addresses one of five goals in a National Science Foundation project aligned to the research question: How does the implementation of a collaborative, multi-institutional learning community of faculty, staff, and administrators change the perceptions, attitudes and knowledge about the transfer process in undergraduate computing and engineering education? The transfer learning community (TLC) created to answer this question was composed of faculty and staff from a mid-sized research university and six partner community colleges. Over four years, members of the TLC participated in meetings and activities focused on articulation and curriculum alignment, cross-institutional advising, and interventions to support long-term, data-driven change to improve transfer student success, especially for women and underrepresented groups in undergraduate computing and engineering. Building common ground among faculty and staff across diverse computing and engineering departments at different institutions required time, trust, and intentional planning. Benefits of the TLC were particularly salient in the last project year (2019-20), when TLC leaders applied feedback from participants requesting more synergistic meetings and relevant activities and addressed shared concerns around transitioning to a fully remote educational model due to COVID-19 campus closures. Using data from surveys, interviews, and meeting transcripts, this paper will discuss lessons learned from this experience in the context of undergraduate computing and engineering education;how to use these lessons to support inclusive excellence in our post-pandemic higher education realities;and recommendations for adapting the TLC model for inter- and intra-institutional collaborations and partnerships for broadening successful transfer pathways in computing and engineering education. © 2021 IEEE.

Increasing Student Self-Reliance and Engagement in Model-Checking Courses

Courses on formal methods focus on two aspects: teaching formalisms and exemplary applications as well as teaching techniques for implementing tools such as model checkers. In this article, we discuss the second aspect and typical shortcomings of corresponding courses. As courses often focus on theoretical results, opportunities for working on real implementations are scarce. In consequence, students are easily overwhelmed with transfer tasks, e.g., when working on existing model checkers during theses or research projects. We present several iterations of our course on model checking, including their goals, course execution as well as feedback from peers and students. Additionally, we discuss how the Covid-19 epidemic impacted our course format and how it was made more suitable for online teaching. Finally, we use these insights to discuss the influence of formality on student engagement, and how to incorporate more practical aspects by introducing inquiry and research-based teaching. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Managing the COVID-19 pandemic in a Portuguese School of Nursing: an experience report

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic, decreed by the WHO in March 2020, created enormous challenges. Our Institution was faced with the need to take measures to control the spread of the disease and keep the academic community safe, for which a comprehensive contingency plan was created so that the entire community felt involved and able to follow the proposed measures. Objectives: (I) Describe the process of building a contingency plan to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic situation in a Nursing School;(II) Describe the implementation of the contingency plan and its adequacy, depending on the evolution of the pandemic situation and (III) Describe the main challenges encountered and the corrective strategies adopted. Methodology: Experience report of the construction and implementation of the Institution's contingency plan. A Contingency Plan Team was appointed that created a plan following the guidelines of the various health regulatory authorities, structured in four topics: 1) organization of structures;2) training;3) organization of academic and work activities;4) follow-up and monitoring. In addition, several guiding documents for safe practices were also prepared, aimed at readjusting the teaching-learning process and the safety of employees. Results: 1) organization of structures: An isolation room was established in each building, Spaces were reorganized to ensure safe distances;antiseptics were distributed;Signals was adopted to make the path;internal dynamics and specific procedures changed. 2) training: Clarification sessions were organized with teachers and online training for students and non-teaching staff, and face-to-face training for cleaning staff and support teams. 3) organization of academic and work activities: plan the beginning and breaks according to the maximum amount of people in the same room, fixed the capacity of each classroom. 4) follow-up and monitoring: a case notification/registration process was created and spread the message for all community on the website and by email. Conclusions: The contingency plan has responded to the Institution's needs. It was dynamic and flexible, always be adjusted according to national norms/guidelines and in partnership with Local Health Authorities. The implemented changes proved to be effective and supported the entire school community, which started to integrate the new rules into their daily lives. The very low cases report of covid-19 with the beginning in our institution, seems to reveal the success of the implemented measures.