CCSE members Anna Sollazzo and Jack Parkinson took part in Working Groups at the 2024 conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) In Milan from the 5th to the 10th of July. Working Groups are research projects – typically multi-institutional and multi-national – which explore topics of computing science education with a team of about 10 researchers. The projects are affiliated with ITiCSE but have a lead-in time of several months, with researchers working independently and meeting frequently until the start of the conference, where they will spend three days working locally to write-up a draft report.

Anna and Jack share their experiences of their Working Groups – and other perspectives on the conference – here.

Anna

I was lucky enough to be a part of an 11-person strong working group bringing together members from Canada, the US, Australia, and the UK. Our focus was equitable Computer Science curriculum. Many efforts to ameliorate EDI in CS revolve around recruitment or community building initiatives; we were interested in investigating the influence of the actual curriculum. From the literature we identified six major curricular factors which had been shown to impact EDI: offering multiple versions of CS1 so as to ‘level the playing field’; simplifying curricular complexity (e.g. reducing prerequisites); providing interdisciplinary routes into computing, through themed courses or combined programs; integrating opportunities for research projects or industry placements; including diverse examples and application areas; and the integration of ethics and social justice. We gathered and began to analyse curriculum data, looking specifically at these factors, from 49 top-rated institutions -- ten each from Canada, the US, UK/Europe, and Australia, with an additional nine demographically or structurally distinct US institutions (e.g. Historically Black Universities, Liberal Arts colleges, etc.). Preliminary findings include the fact that North American institutions offer more opportunities for degree personalisation, though allowing for more electives and interdisciplinary options as compared with UK and European ones, but the latter have more research opportunities; and that, across the board, where courses explicitly focus on EDI and ethics exist, they are nearly always limited to upper-level electives. 

We additionally launched both student and educator surveys. Preliminary data would seem to confirm that students belonging to minority gender and sexual orientation groups find CS less welcoming, and there was general agreement that some aspects of program curriculum are “discouraging”. However, students were also generally positive about the potential for computing to be used for social good. Data from the educator survey is still very limited -- if you would like to fill it out, we would be very grateful!! You can find it here: https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/CSC-Educators

The need for this kind of work was really hammered home for me in the question period following a presentation from the University of Kiel entitled “Why Female Students Are Dropping out of CS Programs”. SIGCSE board chair Alison Clear came to the mic and said, in summary, I did the same research 20, 30 years ago and I could have written the same presentation, my numbers were exactly the same…why hasn’t anything changed? She described how every year she gives a guest lecture in her partner Tony Clear’s intro CS course, and that every year student evaluations ask why they wasted a lecture on all that gender stuff. Murmurs of disappointed agreement and recognition filled the room, full of CS educators from around the world who had shared in her experience.

For all that it felt drowned out by work that in some cases seemed to me to be LLMs for the sake of LLMs, there is good work being done to make CS more open and to educate students in the societal aspects of computing. I am glad to have had the chance to participate in a working group contributing to that facet of CS education. 

Jack

The working group I was involved in was co-led by a CCSE alumni, Ethel Tshukudu, and centred around computing education research in Africa. We explored this from two dimensions: half of the 12-person team explored published literature in computing education in Africa, while the other half explored contextually relevant materials for students of computer science in Africa. The materials group generated a set of CS1 activities, based on the ACM recommended curriculum and rooted in our own experiences of Africa. These materials were evaluated by instructors based in African institutions who saw a lot of value in them and were interested in future iterations. Overall, they commented that there was a need for this work.

The literature group found a large body of work in computer science education research spread over several years. 157 papers met the inclusion criteria, most of them published since 2003. Notably, the papers are scattered across 84 venues, with 70 venues having only one paper each. This could indicate a lack of community and focus among researchers in Africa who have not previously had specific venues to target. CompEd 2025 will be held in Botswana next year, which is also the first time an ACM SIGCSE conference has ever been held in Africa – perhaps this will go some way to providing a space for researchers in Africa to meet, collaborate and find community.

The rest of the conference was generally a mixed bag. I always enjoy the opportunity to catch up with the ITiCSE community because there is always interesting and innovative work taking place. This year I felt that there was an overabundance of generative AI work being presented, evident in three sessions – and the keynote - dedicated to generative AI specifically, and papers within other sessions also involved generative AI in other contexts. This is clearly a topic people are interested in, but I am concerned that it is muscling into the programme a little.

On the bright side, I always try to attend the Doctoral Consortium session because I like to see what up-and-coming work I can expect to see at the conference over the next few years as the PhD students get deeper into their work. This year had an exceptional group of students whose work I will be looking forward to in the coming years, including but not limited to improving drop-out prediction, more intuitive syntax highlighting for learners and teaching computing in prisons.

First published: 22 July 2024

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