Congratulations to SEER Lab’s Stacey Koornneef who successfully defended and submitted her MSc thesis today. Stacey’s thesis is titled “Run, Llama, Run: An Educational Coding Game for Assessing Tangible and Hybrid Interfaces” and was co-supervised by Jeremy Bradbury and Michael Miljanovic.
Congratulations to SEER Lab’s Japnit Ahuja for winning the 2023 Ada Lovelace Special Recognition Award For Women In ICT, a WomenTech Network global award. The award is in recognition of her efforts in founding the Go Girl Organisation which provides free coding workshops to underprivileged girls.
The “Software Engineering for Games in Serious Contexts: Theories, Methods, Tools, and Experiences” book is now out! If you have the opportunity to read it there is a chapter co-authored by SEER Lab’s Michael Miljanovic and Jeremy Bradbury on “Engineering Adaptive Serious Games Using Machine Learning.”
We’re happy to welcome two new Mitacs Globalink research interns to the lab — Sylvain Rocchia from Grenoble INP and Alex Baxter from the University of Edinburgh. Sylvain and Alex will be spending their internship as members of the SEER Lab working on the development of an educational game for learning software testing.
This interactive and multi-modal e-course (https://www.thinkmath.ca/e-courses/experiential/#/) is designed to help instructors of university mathematics and computer science enhance and apply skills for leveraging innovative and inclusive approaches to support experiential learning and student achievement. Specifically, the course examines the connections between engaging in computational modelling and experiential learning practices and lays a foundation for how to enhance pedagogy through activities that engage students in mathematically analyzing and modelling socially relevant issues that are important to them. Course takers learn about inclusive teaching practices that strive to cultivate equitable and accessible learning environments where students feel valued and supported, and experience a sense of belonging. In mathematics and computer sciences, inclusive teaching goes hand-in-hand with opportunities for students to experience real mathematics and computer programming in pursuit of solutions to real problems that are meaningful to them.
Continue reading “Inclusive and Experiential Pedagogies for Undergraduate Mathematics and Computer Science”Computational thinking is now included in K-5 classrooms and this has led to a demand for new interactive and collaborative learning tools that engage a younger audience. Block-based programming and educational games have both been shown to be effective at engaging children, however they have limitations with respect to supporting collaborative learning and equitable access. Our goal in designing Run, Llama, Run was to build on the positive aspects of block-based programming and educational games while also addressing these limitations. Furthermore, we are using Run, Llama,Run as a platform to explore the trade-offs between digital and tangible interfaces to understand how best to support equitable access while maintaining learning, engagement, and collaboration.
Parsons problems are an effective scaffolding activity for coding. The development of Adaptive Parsons problems has provided more flexible scaffolding for students learning to code. However, there is still a gap between Parsons problems and coding tasks which can both challenge and frustrate learners. If you interested in learning more about Nadia Goralski‘s MSc thesis research that bridges this gap you can read her poster paper, “Adapting Between Parsons Problems and Coding Tasks,” published at the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2023). This research is supervised by Jeremy Bradbury.
SEER Lab’s Software Education Lead, Michael Miljanovic won a Best Paper Award at the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2023) for the paper “Embedding and Scaling Writing Instruction Across First- and Second-Year Computer Science Courses” with co-authors Lisa Zhang, Bogdan Simion, Michael Kaler, Amna Liaqat, Daniel Dick, Andi Bergen and Andrew Petersen from the University of Toronto.
Congratulations to Computer Science MSc student and SEER Lab researcher Stacey Koornneef on reaching the finals of the 2023 Ontario Tech Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition!
Congratulations to Filipe de Luna on successfully defending his MSc thesis “OSCAR: A Java Noise Injection Framework.” Felipe was supervised jointly by Prof. João Lourenço at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Prof. Jeremy Bradbury.
