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The Hidden Benefits of the Campus - What the Covid-19 Pandemic Can Teach Us About the Computing Learning Environment
Get PDFThe educational context for students and educators across the world changed when the Covid-19 pandemic forced many educational institutions to shut down all on-campus activities in the spring of 2020. In this paper, we explore how computing students’ behaviors were affected by the transformation to online-based learning during the pandemic and what this can teach us about the learning environment. A mixed-method analysis of a survey sent out to students in the weeks after lockdown investigated the important aspects of the learning environment, both on campus and online. Results show that informal learning spaces are essential to students, yet challenging to transfer effectively to the online environment. Furthermore, the scaffolding for study behavior development provided by the schedule and structure in the oncampus environment was found to be valuable to students, but often difficult to replicate online. In the paper, these findings are described and discussed further, exploring the educators’ short and long-term implications
The Live Programming Lecturing Technique: A Study of the Student Experience in Introductory and Advanced Programming Courses
Get PDFThis paper investigates the topic of teaching programming in higher education. The teaching method often referred to as live programming has become a widely applied lecturing strategy for teaching programming subjects in an interactive fashion. Lectures based on live programming normally involve live demonstrations, explanations and interaction with the students. Although this technique seems to be very popular amongst students and instructors, we hypothesise that it also involves potential challenges. In this paper, we investigate the perceived difficulty and promise of following such an approach from a student perspective. We present results from interviews with 1st and 2nd year IT Bachelor students about their experience with live programming. Our results indicate that students’ engagement and desire to learn through active learning techniques still are very much valid also in introductory and advanced programming courses. Furthermore, we also interpret from our findings a suggested model of a repeated cycle of lecture, demo and exercise as highly beneficial to the student learning process
Synthesizing skin lesion images using CycleGANs – a case study
Get PDFGenerative adversarial networks (GANs) have seen some success as a way to synthesize training data for supervised machine learning models. In this work, we design two novel approaches for synthetic image generation based on CycleGANs, aimed at generating realistic-looking, class-specific dermoscopic skin lesion images. We evaluate the images’ usefulness as additional training data for a convolutional neural network trained to perform a difficult lesion classification task. We are able to generate visually striking images, but their value for augmenting the classifier’s training data set is low. This is in-line with other researcher’s investigations into similar GAN models, indicating the need for further research into forcing GAN models to produce samples further from the training data distribution, and to find ways of guiding the image generation using feedback from the ultimate classification objective
IT students’ perceptions of mandatory coursework
Get PDFA mandatory coursework is an activity a student needs to pass in order to get access to an exam. In an earlier study, we examined to what extent mandatory coursework is in use in higher Norwegian IT education. Although the use differs significantly between the institutions delivering IT studies, we concluded that mandatory coursework to a large extent is in use.
It is therefore interesting to investigate how IT students experience mandatory coursework. Do they believe that mandatory coursework contributes to their achievement of learning outcomes in the courses they study? If not, it might be a good idea to stop using mandatory coursework. And if the students find value in mandatory coursework, how should we use them? And what elements of mandatory coursework do the students appreciate? In this study we seek to find IT students' perceptions of mandatory coursework, through questionnaires and interviews.
The results of this study indicate that a large majority of Norwegian IT students want mandatory coursework. They believe it contributes to their learning, but only within certain prerequisites. Mandatory coursework is mostly needed for technical subjects, such as computer programming. And the assignments should be practical, engaging, relevant for the upcoming exam and with just the right level of difficulty. Creating engaging assignments with the appropriate level of difficulty for all students might prove a difficult task. We found that a particular coursework assignment may be highly appreciated by one group of students, and at the same time disliked by another
Parallel Scalability of Adaptive Mesh Refinement in a Finite Difference Solution to the Shallow Water Equations
Get PDFThe Shallow Water Equations model the fluid dynamics of deep ocean flow, and are used to simulate tides, tsunamis, and storm surges. Numerical solutions using finite difference methods are computationally expensive enough to mandate the use of large computing clusters, and the cost grows not only with the amount of fluid, but also the duration of the simulated event, and the resolution of the approximation. The benefits of increased resolution are mostly connected to regions where complex fluid interactions occur, and are not required globally for the entire simulation. In this paper, we nvestigate the potential for conserving computational resources by applying Adaptive Mesh Refinement to dynamically determined areas of the fluid urface. We implement adaptive mesh refinement in a MacCormack finite difference solver, develop a performance model to predict its behavior on large-scale parallel platforms, and validate its predictions experimentally on two computing clusters. We find that the solver itself has highly favorable parallel scalability, and that the addition of refined areas introduces a performance penalty due to load imbalance that is at most proportional to the refinement degree raised to the third power
Addressing the ethical principles of the Norwegian National Strategy for AI in a kindergarten allocation system
Get PDFThe Norwegian National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (NNSAI) published in 2020 includes seven principles of ethical AI. This paper explores whether those seven principles are stated in a clear enough way and are feasible to be satisfied by a specific AI system. We build an implementation of the Gale-Shapley algorithm to allocate kindergarten places in Bergen, Norway. The presented solution is then evaluated against the ethical principles from the NNSAI. We argue that it is difficult to respect all the ethical principles when implementing a solution to a matching problem
Web-Based Collaborative Learning in CS1: A Study on Outcomes of Peer Code Review
Get PDFBased on a teacher-organized student-to-student code review session, we gathered both quantitative and qualitative data from 177 first-semester Information Technology undergraduate students to learn about their thoughts, experiences and outcomes from collaborative learning through an online tool in an introductory programming course. The students were given a programming exercise to solve using JavaScript in a Web-based IDE facilitating real time code sharing for peerevaluation of code based on five provided evaluation criteria: naming of artifacts in the code, formatting of code, use of data types, use of execution flow, and other comments. In the survey questionnaire, we employed a five-point Likert scale with an additional text field for qualitative feedback. For the qualitative free-text based answers, thematic coding was carried out to identify recurring themes and topics in the students’ answers. Based on the students’ feedback, our results indicate that the majority of the participants had positive experiences resulting in self-reported learning through collaborative work, peer-evaluation and problem solving
Ingeniørdannelse. Kva har danning i teknologifag å gjera?
Get PDFEtter rammeplanen for ingeniørfag, er ingeniørdannelse ein viktig del av dataingeniørstudiet. Dette har vore eit utfordrande krav, for kva er eigentleg ingeniørdanning?
Der er skrive mykje om danning innanfor didaktikk og utdanningsfilosofi, men knapt noko om ingeniørdanning, som me må venta skal vera noko anna enn den generelle danninga og meir konkret for fagdisiplinen vår. Det er synd dersom fagre visjonar om samfunnsansvar, samarbeid, etikk og respekt for andre fagdisiplinar vert reduserte til ullent formulerte «soft skills». Difor er det verd å søkja eit vitskapleg fundament for det danningsinnhaldet som rammeplanen krev. Dette kan me finna ved å støtta oss til dels på den danningsteoretiske tradisjonen (spesielt Kemp og Humboldt) og til dels på tenkjarar og metodeteoretikarar innanfor vårt eige fag (særleg Simon og Weizenbaum)
The Role of Virtual Simulation in Incident Commander Education – A field study
Get PDFThe use of Virtual Simulation (VS) for emergency management and Incident Commander (IC) training and assessment has spread during the last decade. In VS, ICs act in computer-simulated 3D incident scenarios, e.g. fire incidents, road traffic collisions etc. Even though VS provides several benefits, there is a history of hesitation to implement and apply it in emergency education. This paper presents the results of a field study performed during the VS training in four classes of IC-students (90 students). The research focus was on the IC students` attitudes and experiences of VS training. Data were collected through observations and post-training questionnaires. The results show that students are predominantly positive towards virtual simulation. 72% of the IC-students state that they experienced presence to the same extent as in live simulation settings, where they experience high presence. Earlier, photorealism was considered to be necessary to provide virtual learning places with high experiences. According to this study, this is not equally important on a general base. The results argue for the benefits of using VS in IC training, even if there are challenges with the implementation. Furthermore, it contributes to a better understanding of user experiences and realism in VS training compared to live simulation