Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Classroom Evaluation of a Gamified Adaptive Tutoring System

This Research to Practice Work-in-Progress Paper builds on prior developments of a gamified adaptive tutoring system that automates and personalizes a student’s learning process without instructor intervention. To address the continued expansion of general education, as well as the grand challenge of personalized learning, automated learning systems are becoming common within higher education. Our personalized learning system uses an uses a structured, general-purpose game model that enables us to both track and control student progress through the sections of the game. While students play through a system-integrated game, a back-end AI component adaptively chooses both where the student is directed and what help they receive to optimize their learning. The end result is a fully integrated game system that can measure student performance using integrated tests, leveraging that information to adjust game content, address learner misconceptions, and lead to a faster and more effective learning session. As part of continued research, we present results from comparison testing of our educational game system in tandem with relevant course material.With our preliminary results, we focus on demonstrating the system’s ability to provide appropriate content to players based on expert opinion. We show the educational utility of the game system, demonstrating an increase in student performance post-intervention on relevant content tests. We also show results from self-efficacy surveys administered to students to test their opinion of their own abilities. By sharing our testing and verification, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our intelligent educational game system.
Development of WebXR-based Environment for Engineering Experiments

This study presents an improved online/on-demand educational approach to engineering experiments by introducing an interactive 3D virtualized environment. This study aims to verify the possibility of the morphological evolution of fully online/on-demand engineering experiments by enabling the interactive operation of equipment and devices in a 3D virtual space. For this purpose, we developed an extended reality-based engineering experiment system that students can use through a web browser online/on-demand to conduct engineering experiments in a virtual space without requiring actual experimental equipment. By comparing the assessment results of the virtual experiments with on-campus real operation of equipment in the previous year, the educational effectiveness of introducing a virtualized environment that enables interactive online operation of 3D-modeled equipment on a web browser has been confirmed.
Reflections on Agile Software Development: A Conversion Master Case study

This research to practice paper presents a reflective study showing the observations of the teaching teams and the practices during industrial projects for the Master of Software Development (MSwDev) program at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand. It is a conversion master program that helps the students to acquire specific skills to be ready for the transition to the software development industry, including the ability to work in an Agile team. Software development projects supported by industrial partners are an excellent means to evaluate the technical capacity of the students and the required skills. This reflective paper describes the evolution of an industry-sourced problem-based agile student project, which over three successive years, has included students from three different cohorts (User Experience (UX), Business Analysts (BA), and Software Developers (SwDev)). This year, a collaboration between different cohorts was not possible. Thus only software development students formed the agile teams.This paper describes and reflects on the teaching staff’s useful and problematic observations over the last twelve months using only the SwDev cohort and correlates that to the previous reflections when three different cohorts formed an Agile team. Those reflections are described, and several recommendations are drawn from the experiences. The authors also discuss the lessons learnt and the effect of COVID-19 on the teams’ performance.
Design Decisions Matter: Conveying the Importance of Software Engineering Best Practices through Hybrid PBL

This Research Full Paper presents the implementation of a hybrid Project-Based Learning (PBL) model in a Software Engineering (SE) course to balance the focus on teaching fundamental knowledge and fostering of applied software development skills through a real-world project, accompanied by contextualized learning and Just-In-Time (JIT) teaching to develop students' scalable knowledge of how to intelligently design with respect to SE best practices. The data is collected from 2 semesters spanning over 2019 and 2020. Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, this study examines the effectiveness of using the hybrid PBL approach in conveying to students the importance of SE best practices such as the SOLID principles which are deemed as timeless. Results support the claim that JIT lectures help students better evaluate their design decisions and ensure they're on the right track for following optimal design patterns and best practices, and that contextualized learning may be used to develop a notion of why design decisions matter outside of the classroom. Although incorporating these pedagogies in hybrid PBL allows for students' conviction of the significance of SE best practices in academic projects, there still exists room to better convey their significance in industry.
Development of a teaching plan to support learning activities of exploratory test design and execution

This Research Full Paper presents that nowadays it can see the growing evolution of the software development process, making agile methodologies commonly used. In this context, exploratory testing stands out as an alternative used in the industry to meet the needs of agile and / or short-term testing processes. However, professionals use this agile testing approach in an unstructured way, and this may be because they don't really understand how to apply it strategically where they can involve design and execution activities. In this context, this paper aims to present an approach that allows to apply the teaching of design and execution activities of exploratory test following structured procedures and aligned to the curricula (Brazilian and international) of the software engineering together with relevant practices in the industry. This study originates from a literature review, where important gaps are perceived to address exploratory testing education regarding design and execution activities. This involves the need to map the assets present in the curricula of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) and the Association for Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (ACM / IEEE), as well as being guided by the practices prescribed in the TMMi, by have a process area dedicated to these activities. In addition, we highlight the importance of having conducted interviews with professionals to identify tools, techniques and work products commonly used in the industry so that all this supports the alignment between academic and industrial context. In this way, it was possible to develop a consistent program of studies that allowed the construction of a teaching plan involving active pedagogical practices so that students can "learn by doing" in a more interactive way, that is, provide a student-centered teaching and learning in order to make such an approach more beneficial to the student, conditioning them to obtain the competences and abilities expected in the industry.
Designing a Data Science Course for Non-Computer Science Students: Practical Considerations and Findings

This Full Paper in the Research-To-Practice Category illustrates what an online survey of students’ opinions reveals about students’ perceived learning and take-away from a course on Data Science. The course is offered at University of Vienna in the Business Analytics, Data Science, and Digital Humanities faculties as part of the masters’ programs. In this work, we outline the course structures, goals, modules, and present preliminary findings gained while teaching the course. Due to the global pandemic and resulting lock-downs, the course was held online, hence, we also analyze the effects of the current situation on the students.The results revealed that the structure of the course is appreciated by the students. Furthermore, the students liked the open source software taught in the course where they can create visual workflows with an intuitive, drag-and-drop style graphical interface, without the need for coding. The results also confirmed our hypothesis which showed that working in groups is more complex and difficult using online tools. We learn that the instructor-generated technique for forming the groups assigning to each group students with different backgrounds, lead to teams that are able to solve problems faster as they are more cognitively diverse. These findings confirm that the approach used in the Data Science course is viable for teaching computer science skills to non computer-scientist and can be used by other educational institutions.
Recursion: Squeezing the Infinite into the Finite

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach to the teaching of recursion as part of CS education. Recursion is a concept that is generally considered to be hard. Likewise, in the course of mathematics education, induction is problematic, but for the opposite reason: math students are often bewildered by what looks to them suspiciously like a circular definition. So where recursion is hard to comprehend, induction does not motivate. When we see that induction and recursion are two sides of the same coin, it becomes possible to address math and programming as endpoints of one axis, by solving the pedagogy of recursion and induction together.Furthermore, imperative programming (IP) and OOP lose clarity to efficiency, while functional programming (FP) is declarative at the cost of computational intuitions. This oppositional outlook results in a deleterious proliferation of paradigms. Since FP provides the denotational semantics of IP, while IP gives the implementation semantics of FP, it becomes feasible to integrate these by making language questions more reified in one’s presentation. Hence the second axis: FP – IP.We present recursion as a specific instance of our dual-axis, dual-paradigm approach to teaching programming that weaves together multiple facets of programming theory, foundations and pragmatics into a single narrative. While the entire material tends to increase considerably over the usual approach, especially as the material spans across several courses in the curriculum, it turns out considerably more satisfying to the teacher and kinder to the student this way than all other approaches we have tried.Whereas the conventional view of programming pigeonholes recursion as one programming technique among several, we approach it as an ontology that permeates CS. From this vantage point, we have developed a teaching method based on a set of seven principles and their corresponding actionables. So for instance, teaching co-recursion before recursion is an action that emerges from the perspective that it is data that is essentially recursive, while recursive functions are just the computational mirror of such data.We formulate these principles and the corresponding action-ables interspersed with illustrative programming examples.
Introducing Agility into Research Teams

In this paper, we propose an innovative practice based on agile software development methods. This research approach introduces agility into learning of research in an academic environment, resulting in an Agile Research Team. Such a research team follows an agile approach, based on modifications to the Scrum approach, to collaboratively learn about research, and to manage research projects and the researchers involved. Success in research requires self-motivation, collaboration, and knowledge exchange. Traditional research occurs in top-down research groups that are led by a leading researcher, who oversees postdoctoral researchers and Ph.D. students, who in turn manage graduate and undergraduate level students. It is up to individual researchers to stay motivated, to acquire the necessary skills to conduct research, and, oftentimes, to decide what the following steps are. Much like effective research groups, agile software development approaches rely on individuals to form self-organizing and motivated teams to deliver technical excellence. Agile software development teams also require an environment of sharing knowledge between senior and junior developers. Agile approaches can facilitate the efficient exchange of knowledge due to a strong dependency on face-to-face communication and teamwork. With the emerging adoption of agile methods for software development in industry and its ability to expedite projects’ delivery, we argue that such approaches can potentially provide similar benefits for researchers and students in academia. The advantages that agile methods provide are twofold: the ability to respond faster to change, and a shorter feedback loop, which facilitates the learning of how to conduct research. This paper explores the impactful benefits of using an agile approach to manage research team projects to keep researchers motivated, enhance the learning of knowledge and research skills, increase scalability, and foster inclusivity. This paper will also present the roles, responsibilities, and processes defined for managing an Agile Research Team to support adoption of the approach with other research teams. In addition, results and lessons learned are presented following our experience with using the approach as described in this work.
An Approach to Use Comic Strips To Support IoT Systems Requirements Engineering

The term Internet of Things (IoT) describes an environment where billions of objects, restricted in resources, use the Internet as an infrastructure for exchanging messages. In the IoT system, a set of heterogeneous devices such as sensors, actuators, energy sources, and processors are fundamental for the interaction between objects. The construction of these systems demands the professionals’ knowledge in identifying, analyzing, and specifying the requirements that impact the system quality. However, there are challenges in developing these systems because the different perceptions of stakeholders and the different use of computing resources can cause errors in requirements gathering and lead to ambiguities in developing IoT systems. In addition, its characteristics and its large number of elements tend to increase the complexity of its configuration. Therefore, it is necessary to develop techniques to promote effective communication between the stakeholders, regardless of their areas of knowledge, to establish, define and clarify the requirements. This work proposes comic strips (CS) for defining and gathering requirements for IoT systems. The first set of non-functional requirements for IoT systems was identified in the literature, such as maintainability, security, integration, and performance. We developed a syntax for building comics to assist in the definition and requirements gathering of IoT systems from this set. We conducted a feasibility study using informal, formal, and technical workshops with professionals and users to identify the potential for continuity of this proposal. In addition, this discussion was carried out with undergraduate students who could participate in the process, improving their knowledge in requirements engineering. The students could identify divergence among interests and concepts from stakeholders and propose adequated solutions during requirements elicitation. The results obtained from an established comic were positive and promoted communication between stakeholders. This work’s contribution approaches the grammar for defining IoT systems in comics and an effective interaction method.
An Approximated Collapsed Variational Bayes Approach to Variable Selection in Linear Regression

In this work, we propose a novel approximated collapsed variational Bayes approach to model selection in linear regression. The approximated collapsed variational Bayes algorithm offers improvements over mean field variational Bayes by marginalizing over a subset of parameters and using mean field variational Bayes over the remaining parameters in an analogous fashion to collapsed Gibbs sampling. We have shown that the proposed algorithm, under typical regularity assumptions, (a) includes variables in the true underlying model at an exponential rate in the sample size, or (b) excludes the variables at least at the first order rate in the sample size if the variables are not in the true model. Simulation studies show that the performance of the proposed method is close to that of a particular Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler and a path search based variational Bayes algorithm, but requires an order of magnitude less time. The proposed method is also highly competitive with penalized methods, expectation propagation, stepwise AIC/BIC, BMS, and EMVS under various settings. Supplementary materials for the article are available online.
Modeling Engineering Persistence through Expectancy Value Theory and Machine Learning Techniques

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents an investigation of engineering retention using machine learning models. We use random forests and artificial neural networks in the form of multilayer perceptrons to analyze the interaction between different factors, such as demographic information, standardized test scores, first semester grades, and surveys to predict student retention in engineering. We find that obtained models can predict with good accuracy if students will remain in engineering, with F1 scores of at least 75 percent. We find that each model places different levels of importance on distinct factors.
Research-to-Practice for Peer-to-Peer Learning in Engineering Education using Ensemble Methods to Deploy a Lifecycle Design Roadmap

The full paper to address the research to practice category includes the implementation and investigation of learners’ performances and peer-to-peer learning environment strategies to observe the relationships and roles associated with the engineering design lifecycle process. The ability to demonstrate and build on project-based learning introduced how potential decisions are readily accessible and analyze from the engineering design performances of learners’ interaction and decision approach. The interaction includes overall learners’ success rates and cost-effectiveness to model techniques used to improve prediction performance for evaluation. The study considers failure and success rates to understand how cost-effectiveness can be a benefit with the adoption of misclassification rates (e.g., success-prone decisions). In recent studies, the challenge to predict performances has been credited to the success of proposed methods and learning techniques to handle domain-specific areas based on developments and the lifecycle design process. The development of a peer-to-peer learning environment created a high-level overview to explore the engineering design process and the requirements for advancement of the learners’ experience. The learners’ decision in peer-to-peer team environment can be handled differently regarding the areas and types due to the framework proposed using ensemble models. In this evaluation, the questions using a pre- and post-survey assessment tool can be referenced according to the target groups’ decisions. These cues amongst the learner community in engineering education can be integrated using ensemble of attributes as the foundation in the design practices. This study aims to explore the homogeneous ensemble models using multiple method types for predictive analytics to understand the concepts for prediction as a proposed method and framework (i.e., for the assessment of misclassification modeling). As the ensemble classifiers are examined in the research-to-practice for engineering design, the experimental conditions were validated comparably to demonstrate ways to improve prediction and performance. The overall relationship to advance project-based learning in engineering education highlights the variables of how a deployed lifecycle can be used for research-to-practice for peer-to-peer environments using methods in data modeling.
Collaboration program to disseminate cybersecurity in the ECE curriculum

Work in Progress: This paper presents innovative practices in Cybersecurity Education. This field is becoming a critical skill to protect the modern infrastructure. Traditionally cybersecurity has been perceived as a skill used mainly by computer scientists. However, there are concerns about the communication protocols operating at lower layers because the vulnerabilities closer to the physical systems do not receive the same attention as the user applications and human interactions. Consequently, Electrical and Computer Engineering programs must introduce cybersecurity awareness in those areas. A common solution is the addition of a cybersecurity class in ECE curriculums. We tried a more holistic approach by providing interventions in different aspects of the student preparation providing a richer experience.A partnership between the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Analysis Center (DAC) at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) has resulted in students learning about cybersecurity through several methods. The partnership helped define the modification of the curriculum and offered opportunities for new research projects. The efforts include sponsorship of capstone projects and support for graduate teaching assistants specialized in promoting cybersecurity education to the entire cohorts.The specialized teaching assistants offered training to the entire cohort of students participating in the capstone design course to provide everyone with cybersecurity awareness. Some of the capstone projects specialized in designing and building cyber-trainer devices that the soldiers use in the WSMR. Since the fall semester of 2020, three cohorts, including 115 senior students, have benefitted from cybersecurity awareness training. Three major capstone projects were developed, creating cyber-trainers used by the ARMY.Two new courses were added to the Electrical Engineering curriculum, and a new track in security was proposed for a Computer Engineering program. Three graduate students were hired as teaching assistants to help the educational efforts while working on their research projects related to cybersecurity. Several students applied for internship experiences at the ARMY, and some are considering permanent job offerings in the field. Finally, the collaboration has opened other opportunities to apply for traditional research funds in the cybersecurity domain.