Blog
The latest from Google Research
The CS Capacity Program - New Tools and SIGCSE 2017
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Posted by Chris Stephenson, Head of Computer Science Education Strategy
The
CS Capacity program
was launched in March of 2015 to help address a
dramatic increase in undergraduate computer science enrollments
that is creating serious resource and pedagogical challenges for many colleges and universities. Over the last two years, a diverse group of universities have been working to develop successful strategies that support the expansion of high-quality CS programs at the undergraduate level. Their work focuses on innovations in teaching and technologies that support scaling while ensuring the engagement of women and underrepresented students. These innovations could provide assistance to many other institutions that are challenged to provide a high-quality educational experience to an increasing number of introductory-level students.
The cohort of CS Capacity institutions include George Mason University, Mount Holyoke College, Rutgers University, and the University California Berkeley which are working individually, and Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of Florida, and the University of North Carolina which are working together. These institution each brings a unique approach to addressing CS capacity challenges. Two years into the program, we're sharing an update on some of the great projects and ideas to emerge so far.
At George Mason, for example, computer science professor Jeff Offutt and his team have developed an online system to provide self-paced learning for CS1 and CS2 classes that allows learners through the learning materials wore quickly or slowly depending on their needs. The system, called
SPARC
, includes course content, practice and assessment exercises (including automated testing), mini-lectures, and daily inspirations. This team has also launched a program to recruit and train undergraduate tutorial assistants to increase learning support. For more information on SPARC, contact Jeff Offutt at offutt@gmu.edu.
The
MaGE Peer Mentor program
at Mount Holyoke College is addressing its increasing CS student enrollment by preparing undergraduate peer mentors to provide effective feedback on coding assignments and contribute to an inclusive learning environment. One of the major elements of these program is an online course that helps to recruit and train students to be undergraduate peer mentors. Mount Holyoke has made their
entire online course curriculum
for the peer mentor program available so that other institutions can incorporate all or part of it to assist with preparing their own student tutors. For more information on the MaGE curriculum, contact Heather Pon-Barry at ponbarry@mtholyoke.edu.
MaGE Program Students and Faculty from Mount Holyoke College
At University of California, Berkeley, the CS Capacity team is focused on providing access to increased and better tutoring. They’ve instituted
a small-group tutoring program
that includes weekend mastery learning sessions, increased office hours support, designated discussions section, project checkpoint deadlines, exam/homework/lab/discussion walkthrough videos, and a new office hours app that tracks student satisfaction with office hours. For more information on Berkeley’s interventions, contact Josh Hug at hug@cs.berkeley.edu.
The CS Capacity team at Rutgers has been exploring the gender gap at multiple levels using a longitudinal study across four required CS classes (paper to be published in the proceedings of the
SIGCSE 2017 Technical Symposium
). They’re investigating several factors that may impact the retention of women and underrepresented student populations, including intention to major in CS, grades, and prior experience. They’ve also been defining an additional set of feature set to improve their use of
Autolab
(a course management system with automated grading). This work includes building a hint system to provide more information for students who are struggling with a concept or assignment, crowd-sourcing grading, and studying how students think about CS content and the kinds of errors they are making. The Rutgers team will be publishing their study results in the proceedings of the SIGCSE 2017 Technical Symposium. For more information on these tools, contact Andrew Tjang at atjang@cs.rutgers.edu.
The team consisting of Duke, NCSU, UNC, and UF have produced and plan to share tools to improve the student learning experience.
My Digital Hand
(MDH) is a free online tool for managing and tracking one-to-one peer teaching sessions (for example, helping to keep track of how many hours peer mentors are spending with mentees). MDH supports best practice in peer teaching and mitigates some of the observed challenges in taking peer teaching to scale. The team has also been working on ASCEND (Adaptive Student Computing Environment with Natural Language Dialogue), an Eclipse plug-in designed to facilitate remote synchronous peer teaching sessions. Students can share their projects with a peer teaching fellow (PTF) and chat as the PTF leads the student through a session. ASCEND helps instructors better understand current practice by logging all programming actions and textual chats in real time to a database. For more information on these tools, contact Jeff Forbes at forbes@cs.duke.edu.
Several of the CS Capacity principle investigators will be presenting papers on these new interventions and tools at the
SIGCSE conference in March
. Faculty from the CS capacity program will also be presenting a panel and roundtable discussion session called “New Tools and Solutions to Address the CS Capacity Crunch.” If you’re attending SIGCSE this year, we hope you’ll join us on Thursday, March 9, from 3:45-5:00 pm.
Given the likelihood that CS undergraduate enrollments will continue to climb, it is critical that the CS education community continue to find, test, and share solutions and tools that enable institutions to effectively teach more students while maintaining the quality of the education experience for students. Faculty from the CS Capacity program will continue to share their solutions and results with the community via CS education conferences and publications.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
AI for Social Good
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
materials science
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Recommender Systems
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Responsible AI
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Self-Supervised Learning
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
Unsupervised Learning
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2022
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2021
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2020
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
