Tiffany Barnes

North Carolina State University

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i-10 index

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Co-Authors

Veronica Cateté

North Carolina State University

Min Chi

North Carolina State University

Thomas Price

North Carolina State University

Collin F. Lynch

North Carolina State University

Michael Eagle

Office of Chief Medical Examiner

Nicholas Lytle

Georgia Institute of Technology

Jamie Payton

Temple University

Amy Isvik

North Carolina State University

Yihuan Dong

Qingdao Agricultural University

Behrooz Mostafavi

North Carolina State University

Cooperative Institutions

North Carolina State University

131

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Pathways Behavioral Services

University of Washington

Carnegie Mellon University

University of California, Berkeley

North Central State College

Columbia University

University of Florida

Georgia Institute of Technology

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Research Field

Use, Modify, Create

Nicholas Lytle Veronica Cateté Danielle Boulden Yihuan Dong Jennifer Houchins

Computational Thinking (CT) is being infused into curricula in a variety of core K-12 STEM courses. As these topics are being introduced to students without prior programming experience and are potentially taught by instructors unfamiliar with programming and CT, appropriate lesson design might help support both students and teachers. "Use-Modify-Create" (UMC), a CT lesson progression, has students ease into CT topics by first "Using" a given artifact, "Modifying" an existing one, and then eventually "Creating" new ones. While studies have presented lessons adopting and adapting this progression and advocating for its use, few have focused on evaluating UMC's pedagogical effectiveness and claims. We present a comparison study between two CT lesson progressions for middle school science classes. Students participated in a 4-day activity focused on developing an agent-based simulation in a block-based programming environment. While some classrooms had students develop code on days 2-4, others used a scaffolded lesson plan modeled after the UMC framework. Through analyzing student's exit tickets, classroom observations, and teacher interviews, we illustrate differences in perception of assignment difficulty from both the students and teachers, as well as student perception of artifact "ownership" between conditions.

Artifact (error)

Lesson plan

Computational Thinking

Code (set theory)

10.1145/3304221.3319786

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Citations (70)

Idea Builder: Motivating Idea Generation and Planning for Open-Ended Programming Projects through Storyboarding

Wengran Wang Ally Limke Mahesh Bobbadi Amy Isvik Veronica Cateté

In computing classrooms, building an open-ended programming project engages students in the process of designing and implementing an idea of their own choice. An explicit planning process has been shown to help students build more complex and ambitious open-ended projects. However, novices encounter difficulties in exploring and creatively expressing ideas during planning. We present Idea Builder, a storyboarding-based planning system to help novices visually express their ideas. Idea Builder includes three features: 1) storyboards to help students express a variety of ideas that map easily to programming code, 2) animated example mechanics with example actors to help students explore the space of possible ideas supported by the programming environments, and 3) synthesized starter code to help students easily transition from planning to programming. Through two studies with high school coding workshops, we found that students self-reported as feeling creative and feeling easy to communicate ideas; having access to animated example mechanics of an actor help students to build those actors in their plans and projects; and that most students perceived the synthesized starter code from Idea Builder as helpful and time-saving.

Storyboard

10.1145/3626252.3630872

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Citations (0)

SIGCSE symposium 2018 preview

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (2018)

Tiffany Barnes Dan Garcia

We are excited to bring the SIGCSE community together in Baltimore, Maryland around the theme of "CS for All" from February 21-24, 2018 for the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. This year, we had a record 953 submissions to the conference, with 1119 volunteers participating in the reviewing and selection process to whittle it down to 161 papers, 35 panels and special sessions, 90 posters, 10 demos, 34 BOFs, 6 nifty assignments, 11 events, and 34 workshops. We are inspired to see so many of these submissions innovating to engage a broader audience and to create equitable opportunities for access to computer science education! Our theme is enhanced by our co-location with RESPECT 2018, the third international conference on Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology, to be held from 8:30am-5:00pm on Wednesday, February 21.

Theme (computing)

Equity

10.1145/3183559.3183561

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Citations (0)

Admitting you have a problem is the first step: Modeling when and why students seek help in programming assignments.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (2022)

Zhikai Gao Bradley A. Erickson Yiqiao Xu Collin F. Lynch Sarah Heckman

10.5281/zenodo.6853173

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Citations (1)

Ninth SPLICE Workshop on Technology and Data Infrastructure for CS Education Research

Clifford A. Shaffer Peter Brusilovsky Kenneth R. Koedinger Thomas Price Tiffany Barnes

Many SIGCSE attendees are either developing or using online educational tools, and all will benefit from better interoperability among these tools and better analysis of the clickstream data coming from those tools. New tools for analyzing big data leveraged by AI (e.g., deep learning for assessment) in turn improve both content and pedagogy, thus setting up a virtuous cycle fueling learning discoveries and leveraging innovation in AI: Online technologies → big data analysis → better online technologies. This NSF-supported workshop is the latest in a series of SPLICE workshops, and is a continuation of our event at SIGCSE 2023, where the SPLICE-Portal, a dedicated socio-technical research infrastructure for Computing Education Research, was presented. This year, we continue the work with several new SPLICE community working groups, including those on Dashboards, Large Language Models, Parsons Problems, and Smart Learning Content Protocols. We continue to build upon our existing collaborations developed over the course of the project to engage more members of the community in tasks that will advance the project agenda.

Ninth

splice

10.1145/3626253.3633431

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Citations (0)

Evaluation of a Frame-based Programming Editor

Thomas Price Neil C. C. Brown Dragan Lipovac Tiffany Barnes Michael Kölling

Frame-based editing is a novel way to edit programs, which claims to combine the benefits of textual and block-based programming. It combines structured `frames' of preformatted code, designed to reduce the burden of syntax, with `slots' that allow for efficient textual entry of expressions. We present an empirical evaluation of Stride, a frame-based language used in the Greenfoot IDE. We compare two groups of middle school students who worked on a short programming activity in Greenfoot, one using the original Java editor, and one using the Stride editor. We found that the two groups reported similarly low levels of frustration and high levels of satisfaction, but students using Stride progressed through the activity more quickly and completed more objectives. The Stride group also spent significantly less time making purely syntactic edits to their code and significantly less time with non-compilable code.

STRIDE

Code (set theory)

Java Programming Language

10.1145/2960310.2960319

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Citations (30)

Highlights of broadening participation research at RESPECT'16

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (2016)

Tiffany Barnes Jamie Patent

RESPECT'16, the second international conference of the IEEE Computer Society Special Technical Community on Broadening Participation, was held this August in conjunction with the STARS Celebration in Atlanta, GA.

Atlanta

Conjunction (astronomy)

10.1145/3015259.3015263

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Citations (0)

Application of the Delphi Method in Computer Science Principles Rubric Creation

Veronica Cateté Tiffany Barnes

Growing public demand for computer science (CS) education in K-12 schools requires an increase in well-qualified and well-supported computing teachers. To alleviate the lack of K-12 computing teachers, CS education researchers have focused on hosting professional development workshops to prepare in-service teachers from other disciplines to teach introductory level computing courses. In addition to the curriculum knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge taught in the professional development workshops, these new teachers need support in computer science subject matter knowledge throughout the school year. In particular, these new teachers find it difficult to grade programs and labs. This research study uses two variations of the Delphi Method to create learning-oriented rubrics for Computer Science Principles teachers using the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum. To perform this study we implemented (1) a heavy-weight, heterogeneous wide-net Delphi, and (2) a lower-weight, homogeneous Delphi composed of master teachers. These methods resulted in the creation of two systematically- and rigorously-created rubrics that produce consistent grading and very similar inter-rater reliabilities.

Rubric

Delphi Method

Delphi

Grading (engineering)

10.1145/3059009.3059042

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Citations (9)

Proceedings of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (9th, Raleigh, North Carolina, June 29-July 2, 2016).

Educational Data Mining (2016)

Tiffany Barnes Min Chi Mingyu Feng

Source

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FLAMES: A Socially Relevant Computing Summer Internship for High School Students

Amy Isvik Veronica Cateté Tiffany Barnes

In this article, we examine a female-oriented, high school computing outreach program, FLAMES, consisting of an 8-week high school summer intern program run within a university computer science (CS) department. We focus on examining the effects of the program on students skills and affect towards computing. Much of the literature in CS outreach research examines summer camps, after-school programs, and other school-year events that often have a focus on only teaching students computing content. Our program is unique and socially relevant as students are trained to assist teachers with the development of Computational Thinking-Infused curricula for their classrooms. This paper presents the design of our program, an overview of the curriculum, and results including both student and teacher feedback. Results show that the program has benefited each of the parties involved, including its student participants, facilitators, and the teachers assisted by the participants. We share our lessons learned in order to help other CS departments develop similar broadening participation in computing programs.

Outreach

Computational Thinking

10.1109/respect49803.2020.9272515

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Citations (2)