Education Commons^™

Building Postsecondary Pathways For Latinx Students In Computing: Lessons From Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Anne-Marie Núñez, David S. Knight, Sanga Kim

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

While the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the use of technology in education and the workforce, a shortage of computer scientists continues, and computing remains one of the least diverse STEM disciplines. Efforts to diversify the computing industry often focus on the most selective postsecondary institutions, which are predominantly White. We highlight the role of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) in gradating large numbers of STEM graduates of color, particularly Latinx students. HSIs are uniquely positioned to leverage asset-based approaches that value students’ cultural background. We describe the practices educators use in the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a network of 40 HSIs …

Rosenzweig, Equality, And Assignment, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In his seminal book "The Star of Redemption", the renowned philosopher Franz Rosenzweig illustrated his ideas by the intuitive difference between mathematical statements A=B and B=A. Of course, from the purely mathematical viewpoint, these two statements are always equivalent, so to a person trained in mathematics -- even in simple school mathematics -- this illustration is puzzling. What we show is that from the viewpoint of common folks, there is indeed a subtle difference between how people understand these two equalities. To us, the understanding of this difference helped us better understand Rosenzweig's ideas. But we believe that this difference …

Adversarial Teaching Approach To Cybersecurity: A Mathematical Model Explains Why It Works Well, Christian Servin, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Teaching cybersecurity means teaching all possible ways how software can be attacked -- and how to fight such attacks. From the usual pedagogical viewpoint, a natural idea seems to be to teach all these ways one by one. Surprisingly, a completely different approach works even better: when the class is divided into sparring mini-teams that try their best to attack each other and defend from each other. In spite of the lack of thoroughness, this approach generates good specialists -- but why? In this paper, by analyzing a simple mathematical model of this situation, we explain why this approach work …

How To Detect Future Einsteins: Towards Systems Approach, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Talents are rare. It is therefore important to detect and nurture future talents as early as possible. In many disciplines, this is already being done -- via gifted and talented programs, Olympiads, and other ways to select kids with unusually high achievements. However, the current approach is not perfect: some of the kids are selected simply because they are early bloomers, they do not grow into unusually successful researchers; on the other hand, many of those who later become very successful are not selected since they are late bloomers. To avoid these problems, we propose to use systems approach: to …

A Recent Result About Random Metrics Explains Why All Of Us Have Similar Learning Potential, Christian Servin, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the same class, after the same lesson, the amount of learned material often differs drastically, by a factor of ten. Does this mean that people have that different learning abilities? Not really: experiments show that among different students, learning abilities differ by no more than a factor of two. This fact have been successfully used in designing innovative teaching techniques, techniques that help students realize their full learning potential. In this paper, we deal with a different question: how to explain the above experimental result. It turns out that this result about learning abilities -- which are, due to …

Geophysical Investigations Of The San Andreas Fault System And Evaluations In Geoscience Education, Sandra Hardy

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Chapter 1: Investigating Earthquake Cycle Vertical Deformation Recorded by GPS And Regional Tide Gauge Stations in California

Geodetic and tide gauge measurements of vertical deformation record localized zones of uplift and subsidence that may document critical components of both long and short-period earthquake cycle deformation. In this study, we compare vertical tide gauge data from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) and vertical GPS data from the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) for 10 approximately co-located station pairs along coastal California from Point Reyes, CA to Ensenada, Mexico. To compare these two data sets, we first truncate both …