Education Commons^™

Systematizing Confidence In Open Research And Evidence (Score), Nazanin Alipourfard, Beatrix Arendt, Daniel M. Benjamin, Noam Benkler, Michael Bishop, Mark Burstein, Martin Bush, James Caverlee, Yiling Chen, Chae Clark, Anna Dreber Almenberg, Timothy M. Errington, Fiona Fidler, Nicholas Fox, Aaron Frank, Hannah Fraser, Scott Friedman, Ben Gelman, James Gentile, Jian Wu, Et Al., Score Collaboration

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Assessing the credibility of research claims is a central, continuous, and laborious part of the scientific process. Credibility assessment strategies range from expert judgment to aggregating existing evidence to systematic replication efforts. Such assessments can require substantial time and effort. Research progress could be accelerated if there were rapid, scalable, accurate credibility indicators to guide attention and resource allocation for further assessment. The SCORE program is creating and validating algorithms to provide confidence scores for research claims at scale. To investigate the viability of scalable tools, teams are creating: a database of claims from papers in the social and behavioral …

Understanding And Predicting Retractions Of Published Work, Sai Ajay Modukuri, Sarah Rajtmajer, Anna Cinzia Squicciarini, Jian Wu, C. Lee Giles

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recent increases in the number of retractions of published papers reflect heightened attention and increased scrutiny in the scientific process motivated, in part, by the replication crisis. These trends motivate computational tools for understanding and assessment of the scholarly record. Here, we sketch the landscape of retracted papers in the Retraction Watch database, a collection of 19k records of published scholarly articles that have been retracted for various reasons (e.g., plagiarism, data error). Using metadata as well as features derived from full-text for a subset of retracted papers in the social and behavioral sciences, we develop a random forest classifier …

Model Ai Assignments 2018, Todd W. Neller, Zack Butler, Nate Derbinsky, Heidi Furey, Fred Martin, Michael Guerzhoy, Ariel Anders, Joshua Eckroth

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Model AI Assignments session seeks to gather and disseminate the best assignment designs of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education community. Recognizing that assignments form the core of student learning experience, we here present abstracts of seven AI assignments from the 2018 session that are easily adoptable, playfully engaging, and flexible for a variety of instructor needs. Assignment specifications and supporting resources may be found at http://modelai.gettysburg.edu.

The Birds Of A Feather Research Challenge, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Neller presented a set of research challenges for undergraduates that allow an excellent formative experience of research, writing, peer review, and potential presentation and publication through a top-tier conference. The focus problem is the analysis of a newly-designed solitaire card game, Birds of a Feather, so potentials for discovery abound. Open access talk slides, research code, solvability data sets, research tutorial videos, and more are also available at http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~tneller/puzzles/boaf .

Playful Ai Education, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this talk, Neller shared how games can serve as a fun means of teaching not only game-tree search in Artificial Intelligence (AI), but also such diverse topics as constraint satisfaction, logical reasoning, planning, uncertain reasoning, machine learning, and robotics. He observed that teachers teach best when they enjoy what they share and encouraged AI educators present to teach to their unique strengths and enthusiasms.

Ai Education: Open-Access Educational Resources On Ai, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Open-access AI educational resources are vital to the quality of the AI education we offer. Avoiding the reinvention of wheels is especially important to us because of the special challenges of AI Education. AI could be said to be “the really interesting miscellaneous pile of Computer Science”. While “artificial” is well-understood to encompass engineered artifacts, “intelligence” could be said to encompass any sufficiently difficult problem as would require an intelligent approach and yet does not fall neatly into established Computer Science subdisciplines. Thus AI consists of so many diverse topics that we would be hard-pressed to individually create quality learning …

The Digital Musing Of A History Buff, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Perhaps the best part of studying Computer Science (CS) is that it is not an isolated discipline; CS exists to produce systems and applications that support the business and interests of nearly every person in the world. Any area of inquiry is open to fanciful and meaningful exploration by computer scientists. In a very real sense, the world is the oyster of those who can use digital tools developed by CS.

In his talk, Dr. Kann will explore how he uses those digital tools to advance his enthusiasm for history. The talk will highlight some of the work he has …

Identification Of The Emergent Leaders Within A Cse Professional Development Program, Tracie Evans Reding, Brian Dorn, Neal Grandgenett, Harvey Siy, Jon Youn, Qiuming Zhu, Carol A. Engelmann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The need for high quality, sustainable Computer Science Education (CSE) professional development (PD) at the grades K-12 level is essential to the success of the global CSE initiatives. This study investigates the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to identify emergent teacher leaders within a high quality CSE PD program. The CSE PD program was designed and implemented through collaboration between the computer science and teacher education units at a Midwestern metropolitan university in North America. A unique feature of this specific program is in the intentional development of a social network. This study discusses the importance of social networks, …

Uncertainty Avoidance—A New Teaching/ Learning Method For An Introductory Programming Course, Zhen Jiang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we introduce a new procedure for under-represented students to quickly learn the use of the decision structure in computer programming. The challenge here is to help students, who lack sufficient background of mathematics and computer programming, to use this structure correctly without too much doubt and uncertainty. The traditional CS0 program elapses several semesters and requires many foundation courses to be taken before the students have knowledge of the program correctness. Our one-semester course CSC115 allows students to build up programming skills gradually case by case and program by program. Such a guideline is proven to be …

Export To Arduino: A Tool To Teach Processor Design On Real Hardware, Michael Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Many computer organization courses teach digital design and processor architecture without a hardware lab or physical equipment. This paper introduces a module to allow students to export digital designs as C programs that run on an inexpensive Arduino Uno, thereby allowing students to test and observe their designs in actual hardware with minimal setup time and equipment. The module runs within Emumaker86, an open-source digital design tool previously developed by the author for teaching microprocessor architecture, and can handle designs ranging from simple combinational circuits to a complete processor. Students were given this module in an undergraduate "Systems Computing" course, …

Public Debate Format For The Development Of Soft Skill Competency In Computer Science Curricula, Christopher S. Stuetzle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a method for incorporating soft skill development into a traditional computer science curriculum through the use of a public debate format. The debate format forces participants to practice public speaking, active listening, teamwork, research and preparation, and critical thinking, as well as having the less obvious benefit of contextualizing the material taught in the classroom by introducing contemporary, real-world debate topics. This work presents an example of the incorporation of public debates in an upper-level human-computer interaction class, including a discussion of student feedback, and suggestions for adopting the debate format to other upper-level courses and its perceived …

Making Sense Of Video Analytics: Lessons Learned From Clickstream Interactions, Attitudes, And Learning Outcome In A Video-Assisted Course, Michail N. Giannakos, Konstantinos Chorianopoulos, Nikos Chrisochoides

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Online video lectures have been considered an instructional media for various pedagogic approaches, such as the flipped classroom and open online courses. In comparison to other instructional media, online video affords the opportunity for recording student clickstream patterns within a video lecture. Video analytics within lecture videos may provide insights into student learning performance and inform the improvement of video-assisted teaching tactics. Nevertheless, video analytics are not accessible to learning stakeholders, such as researchers and educators, mainly because online video platforms do not broadly share the interactions of the users with their systems. For this purpose, we have designed an …

Scaffolding To Improve Writing Skills In A Computer Science Literacy Course, Wu He, Harris Wu, Li Xu, Kurt Maly

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Writing has been recognized as an important skill in the technology field. This paper reports a study that uses a scaffolding approach to improve student writing skills in a computer science literacy course. While the quantitative results do not show a significant impact of scaffolding in individual paper assignment on the subsequent group wiki assignment, the student feedback in end-of-semester evaluations strongly indicated that scaffolding indeed helped improve their writing.

Digital Scholarship: Applying Digital Tools To Undergraduate Student Research Papers, A Proposal For A Freshman Seminar. Part I: Definition Of Student Research Methodology, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

There are many digital tools that can be used for research and presentation in nearly every college discipline, including the social sciences and humanities. These tools hold the promise to radically change both the process and products of research. But in their application these tools have failed miserably to live up to their promise.

This paper is based on the hypothesis that one reason these tools do reach their potential is that there is no systemic way to include them in research process, resulting in the tools being seen as ways to improve the final research product. This results in …

P2n: A Pedagogical Pattern For Teaching Computer Programming To Non-Cs Majors, Zhen Jiang, Eduardo B. Fernandez, Liang Cheng

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Istart: Interactive Strategy Training For Active Reading And Thinking, Danielle S. Mcnamara, Irwin B. Levinstein, Chutima Boonthum

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) is a Web-based application that provides young adolescent to college-age students with high-level reading strategy training to improve comprehension of science texts. iSTART is modeled after an effective, human-delivered intervention called self-explanation reading training (SERT), which trains readers to use active reading strategies to self-explain difficult texts more effectively. To make the training more widely available, the Web-based trainer has been developed. Transforming the training from a human-delivered application to a computer-based one has resulted in a highly interactive trainer that adapts its methods to the performance of the students. The …