Computer Sciences Commons^™

A Framework That Explores The Cognitive Load Of Cs1 Assignments Using Pausing Behavior, Joshua O. Urry

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Pausing behavior in introductory Computer Science (CS1) courses has been related to a student’s performance in the course and could be linked to a student’s cognitive load, or assignment difficulty. Having an objective measure of the cognitive load would be beneficial to course instructors as it would help them design assignments that are not too difficult. Two studies are presented in this work. The first study uses Cognitive Load Theory and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development as a theoretical framework to analyze pause times between keystrokes to better understand what types of assignments need more educational support than others. The …

Sustainability Projects With A Community Partner: A Social Norm Nudging Effort, Benjamin Gan, Thomas Menkhoff, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Singapore students from two inter-disciplinary courses worked with stakeholders of a local business association community partner on a series of sustainability topics to learn about climate change, its effects, and actions to mitigate them. They empathized with the association stakeholders, proposed a digital technology solution, tested their prototypes, and presented the final action plans. After the projects were completed, we found climate proficient (83%), motivated (83%), engaged (97%), and satisfied (70%) students; and two influencing predictors: interest/enjoyment and emotional engagement. The study results suggest that getting students interested and emotionally engaged in sustainability projects is an important first step towards …

Singapore's Ai Applications In The Public Sector: Six Examples, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Steven M. Miller describes six instances in which Singapore has applied AI in the public sector, illustrating different ways of improving its engagement with the public by making government services more accessible, anywhere, anytime, and speeding its responses to public processes and feedback. He illustrates how its leaders made the city a living lab for AI use, and what they learned.

Pedagogical Prisms: Toward Domain Isomorphic Analogy Design For Relevance And Engagement In Computing Education, Briana Christina Bettin, Linda Ott

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 2

Analogy is a frequently leveraged pedagogical tool used across many disciplines, with computing being no exception. Computing education researchers, however, have raised concerns regarding the limitations of analogy. One obvious concern is the relevance of any given analogy to learners. Designing relevant analogies can greatly increase student engagement with the problem space by centering examples on their lived experiences. Relevant analogies can also facilitate learners in building appropriate connections as they explore novel concepts. Designing relevant analogies is an ongoing process which requires understanding the learners' context. It is unlikely that any given analogy will be "universally"relevant across learners, problems, …

Generation Z Cybersecurity Learners: The Identification Of Cybersecurity Instructor Strategies And Attributes That Maximize Student Engagement, Jeffrey Rice

Scholar Week 2016 - present

There exists a significant shortage of cybersecurity specialists in the workforce. Universities should endeavor to keep cybersecurity students engaged if they desire to be competitive and contribute graduates to the remediation efforts of this cybersecurity deficit. Instructors significantly contribute to student engagement and there is a correlation between student engagement and student retention. The purpose of this regional qualitative exploratory study was to identify attributes that Generation Z collegiate cybersecurity learners felt kept them engaged in their cybersecurity courses. The sample comprised 10 individuals identified as GenZ and used purposeful and snowball sampling to select participants. A semi-structured interview strategy …

A Preliminary Study Of The Efficacy Of Using A Wrist-Worn Multiparameter Sensor For The Prediction Of Cognitive Flow States In University-Level Students, Josephine Graft, William Romine, Brooklynn Watts, Noah Schroeder, Tawsik Jawad, Tanvi Banerjee

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Engagement is enhanced by the ability to access the state of flow during a task, which is described as a full immersion experience. We report two studies on the efficacy of using physiological data collected from a wearable sensor for the automated prediction of flow. Study 1 took a two-level block design where activities were nested within its participants. A total of five participants were asked to complete 12 tasks that aligned with their interests while wearing the Empatica E4 sensor. This yielded 60 total tasks across the five participants. In a second study representing daily use of the device, …

Accurate Estimation Of Time-On-Task While Programming, Kaden Hart, Christopher M. Warren, John Edwards

Computer Science Student Research

In a recent study, students were periodically prompted to self-report engagement while working on computer programming assignments in a CS1 course. A regression model predicting time-on-task was proposed. While it was a significant improvement over ad-hoc estimation techniques, the study nevertheless suffered from lack of error analysis, lack of comparison with existing methods, subtle complications in prompting students, and small sample size. In this paper we report results from a study with an increased number of student participants and modified prompting scheme intended to better capture natural student behavior. Furthermore, we perform a cross-validation analysis on our refined regression model …

Challenges, Choice, & Change: Experiences And Reflections From The First Semester Of A Technology And Human Futures Course, Briana Christina Bettin

Michigan Tech Publications

Society's rapidly increasing reliance on technology has created urgency for future leaders to understand these technologies' potential impacts. News of technical and algorithmic concerns in society are frequent, highlighting the real impacts to real people. Learners may approach computing in order to feel prepared for careers and life in modern society. These learners benefit from understanding the many ways technology may be part of their future careers, their lives, and the lives of others. Beyond this, many wish to use computing to solve problems - but complex societal problems may feel too overwhelming to solve. Greater understanding of the technologies …

Interacting With A Chatbot-Based Advising System: Understanding The Effect Of Chatbot Personality And User Gender On Behavior, Mohammad Amin Kuhail, Justin Thomas, Salwa Alramlawi, Syed Jawad Hussain Shah, Erik Thornquist

All Works

Chatbots with personality have been shown to affect engagement and user subjective satisfaction. Yet, the design of most chatbots focuses on functionality and accuracy rather than an interpersonal communication style. Existing studies on personality-imbued chatbots have mostly assessed the effect of chatbot personality on user preference and satisfaction. However, the influence of chatbot personality on behavioral qualities, such as users’ trust, engagement, and perceived authenticity of the chatbots, is largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, this study contributes: (1) A detailed design of a personality-imbued chatbot used in academic advising. (2) Empirical findings of an experiment with students who interacted …

A Practical Model Of Student Engagement While Programming, John M. Edwards, Kaden Hart, Christopher M. Warren

Computer Science Faculty and Staff Publications

We consider the question of how to predict whether a student is on or off task while working on a computer programming assignment using elapsed time since the last keystroke as the single independent variable. In this paper we report results of an empirical study in which we intermittently prompted CS1 students working on a programming assignment to self-report whether they were engaged in the assignment at that moment. Our regression model derived from the results of the study shows power-law decay in the engagement rate of students with increasing time of keyboard inactivity ranging from a nearly 80% engagement …

Enhancing Employee Engagement To Improve Financial Performance, Christine Lamacchia

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Business leaders are negatively affected when many employees are not engaged in their jobs. Business leaders who struggle to achieve employee engagement suffer decreased profitability, sales, employee retention, and customer satisfaction. Grounded in employee engagement theory, the purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore strategies IT business leaders use to engage employees. The participants were five IT business leaders who successfully developed strategies to engage employees. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, company documents, and artifacts. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Two themes emerged: creating a company culture conducive to employee engagement and using …

Engagement Of Information Systems Professionals In Open Source Software Development, Md Saifur Rahman Bhuiyan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Open source (OS) development of software is becoming increasingly desirable for individuals and organizations alike. Organizations that heavily resisted this new way of developing software are now actively participating in this process. Participation of information systems (IS) professionals in the open source environment has been a focal point in this stream of research in information systems. The dissertation goes beyond participation and examines engagement of IS professionals in the open source environment. The concept of engagement facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between a person and a his or her work. The three essays in the dissertation examine …

Engagement And Computational Thinking Through Creative Coding, Dana Hoppe

Honors Theses

Rising enrollments in Computer Science pose an opportunity to engage students from diverse backgrounds and interests; and a challenge to deliver on positive learning outcomes. While student engagement is the driving factor for increased learning performance and retention, it has been declining to new lows for Computer Science students in recent years. In order to further explore the potential of contextualized computing as a tool for increasing engagement in computing and developing Computational Thinking aptitude in students, we have developed an introductory computing course contextualized with Art and Design with modules centered around guiding pedagogical principles and aimed at middle …

Technology Business Leaders' Strategies To Increase Employees' Engagement, Desmond J. L. Browne

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractEmployee disengagement is costly and reduces an organization's ability to meet its full potential to produce business results. Technology business leaders who have engaged employees can positively alter the company's rapid transformation to be more competitive. Grounded by the social exchange theory, the purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore strategies 6 technology leaders in the Atlanta metropolitan area use to engage employees. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and company documents. Data were analyzed using Yin's 5-step data analysis process. Three themes emerged: communicate with transparency, provide offerings for training and rewards, and identify and implement …

Exploring The State-Of-Receptivity For Mhealth Interventions, Florian Künzler, Varun Mishra, Jan-Niklas Kramer, David Kotz, Elgar Fleisch, Tobias Kowatsch

Dartmouth Scholarship

Recent advancements in sensing techniques for mHealth applications have led to successful development and deployments of several mHealth intervention designs, including Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI). JITAIs show great potential because they aim to provide the right type and amount of support, at the right time. Timing the delivery of a JITAI such as the user is receptive and available to engage with the intervention is crucial for a JITAI to succeed. Although previous research has extensively explored the role of context in users’ responsiveness towards generic phone notiications, it has not been thoroughly explored for actual mHealth interventions. In this …

Polyxpress+: Using Social Networking To Enhance The User Experience Of An Interactive Location-Based Storytelling Application, Desiree Creel

Master's Theses

There’s no denying the ever increasing presence of social networking in our daily lives. Every day, people share what they are thinking, doing, and experiencing. But even more so, they check their favorite networks to see what the people in their lives are sharing. Social networking has become so prevalent that most applications incorporate it since it keeps users engaged and beckons them back to the application again and again.

PolyXpress is an interactive, location-based storytelling mobile application that functions as a platform for creating and experiencing stories. Written as a research project at California Polytechnic State University, it allows …

Social Media Policy To Support Employee Productivity In The Finance Industry, David Shaun Rogers

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Business leaders may see social media as a distraction for their workers; however, blocking access could lead to a reduction in productivity. Using social media technologies with knowledge workers could achieve cost reductions for payroll of 30% to 35%. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore how business leaders used a social media policy to support employee productivity. The conceptual framework for this study was social exchange theory, which supports the notion that dyad and small group interactions make up most interactions, and such interactions enhance employees' productivity. The research question was to explore how finance industry …

Three Decades Of Universal Design - Defining Moments, Margaret Kinsella

Articles

This paper contributes to the growing research on incorporating Universal Design in the Higher Education landscape by presenting a Practitioner's Perspective on Universal Design as delivered in the Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown (ITB) in the first year of a creative digital media degree as part of the first year experience. This first year experience is a transition time for many students and has many complexities; while being an exciting and fulfilling time, the transition can also be challenging and isolating. Through Universal Design, the aim is to enable students to 'Get connected' and 'Stay connected'. Universal Design for Learning is …

Modeling Engagement Of Programming Students Using Unsupervised Machine Learning Technique, Hua Leong Fwa, Lindsay Marshall

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Engagement is instrumental to students’ learning and academic achievements. In this study, we model the engagement states of students who are working on programming exercises in an intelligent tutoring system. Head pose, keystrokes and action logs of students automatically captured within the tutoring system are fed into a Hidden Markov Model for inferring the engagement states of students. With the modeling of students’ engagement on a moment by moment basis, intervention measures can be initiated automatically by the system when necessary to optimize the students’ learning. This study is also one of the few studies that bypass the need for …

An Engagement Strategy For Teaching Computing Concepts, El Sayed Mahmoud

Publications and Scholarship

The research work in this paper investigates a new teaching strategy that uses active learning through play to increase students’ uptake of learning computing concepts. The strategy promotes student engagement through playing a customized Jenga game. The game consists of a set of blocks, one side of each block is covered with a piece of dry-erase tape to allow erasing and writing on the blocks. This allows instructors to reuse this editable Jenga for developing their own game-based learning activities. The editable Jenga can be used without writing if needed. Three sample activities with writing have been developed and conducted …

Strategies To Improve Engagement Among Public Sector Information Technology Employees, Michelle Dawn Benham

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Disengaged employees decrease organizations' efficiencies and profitability. Engaged employees provide greater productivity and performance while being less likely to incur job burnout and exhaustion. However, public sector organizational leaders still struggle to engage their information technology (IT) employees. Partnering with a large public sector organization in the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area, in a case study design, this study explored the strategies that public sector business leaders use to increase productivity through engaging IT employees. The conceptual framework for this study was the job demands-resources framework. Four participants were selected through purposeful sampling from a population of 7 IT leaders who …

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Stamina Combat Overhaul, Richard Rattner

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

No abstract provided.

Preparing Computer Science Graduates For The 21st Century, Paul Parsons

Paul Parsons

The nature of computer use has changed remarkably in the past fifty years. However, most undergraduate computer science courses are still often taught through an old paradigm that is not adequate to address modern concerns. This 90 minute seminar will address some issues relevant to preparing computer scientists for the 21st century. These include issues central to human-computer interaction (HCI) such as cognitive and perceptual aspects of computer users, ergonomics, and human factors. Although there has been literature on this topic for at least the past 15 years, it is still not widely recognized nor understood by the majority of …

Naturalists’ Perspectives On The Use Of Mobile Technology During A Nature Hike, Aubin Marishka Radzewicz St. Clair

Master's Theses

Naturalists act as our link between scientific knowledge and the public’s understanding of natural history and conservation efforts. In order for them to succeed, they need access to reference materials as well as up-to-date information (Mankin, Warner, & Anderson, 1999). Incorporating mobile technology (i.e. tablets) into naturalists’ endeavors in natural history and environmental education can be used as supportive and educational tools. My project investigated how newly trained naturalists used tablet technology while leading groups of children on nature hikes. I investigated naturalists’ views on the use of mobile technology as a tool during the hikes. My research was guided …

Monitoring Student Engagement And Improving Performance, Brian Keegan, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

Conference papers

No abstract provided.

Investigating Automatic Measurements Of Prosodic Accommodation And Its Dynamics In Social Interaction, Celine De Looze, Stefan Scherer, Brian Vaughan, Nick Campbell

Articles

Spoken dialogue systems are increasingly being used to facilitate and enhance human communication. While these interactive systems can process the linguistic aspects of human communication, they are not yet capable of processing the complex dynamics involved in social interaction, such as the adaptation on the part of interlocutors. Providing interactive systems with the capacity to process and exhibit this accommodation could however improve their efficiency and make machines more socially-competent interactants.

At present, no automatic system is available to process prosodic accommodation, nor do any clear measures exist that quantify its dynamic manifestation. While it can be observed to be …

A Theoretical Framework For Serious Game Design: Exploring Pedagogy, Play And Fidelity And Their Implications For The Design Process, Pauline Rooney

Articles

It is widely acknowledged that digital games can provide an engaging, motivating and “fun” experience for students. However an entertaining game does not necessarily constitute a meaningful, valuable learning experience. For this reason, experts espouse the importance of underpinning serious games with a sound theoretical framework which integrates and balances theories from two fields of practice: pedagogy and game design (Kiili, 2005; Seeney & Routledge, 2009). Additionally, with the advent of sophisticated, immersive technologies, and increasing interest in the opportunities for constructivist learning offered by these technologies, concepts of fidelity and its impact on student learning and engagement, have emerged …

Twitris+: Social Media Analytics Platform For Effective Coordination, Gary Alan Smith, Amit P. Sheth, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Hemant Purohit, Lu Chen, Michael Cooney, Pavan Kapanipathi, Pramod Anantharam, Pramod Koneru, Wenbo Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

Twitris+ is a Semantic Social Media analytics platform to provide technologies for analyzing large-scale social media streams across Spatio-Temporal-Thematic (STT) and People-Content-Network (PCN) dimensions. It provides holistic situational awareness from one interface and enables organizational actors to engage in well-coordinated ways for desired tasks during emergency response.

Model Individualization For Real-Time Operator Functional State Assessment, Guangfan Zhang, Roger Xu, Wei Wang, Aaron A. Pepe, Feng Li, Jiang Li, Frederick Mckenzie, Tom Schnell, Nick Anderson, Dean Heitkamp

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Proper assessment of Operator Functional State (OFS) and appropriate workload modulation offer the potential to improve mission effectiveness and aviation safety in both overload and under-load conditions. Although a wide range of research has been devoted to building OFS assessment models, most of the models are based on group statistics and little or no research has been directed towards model individualization, i.e., tuning the group statistics based model for individual pilots. Moreover, little emphasis has been placed on monitoring whether the pilot is disengaged during low workload conditions. The primary focus of this research is to provide a real-time engagement …