SICSA Education Workshop:
Technology Enhanced Learning for Computer Science

Event Details

How do we teach Computer Science to our university students? Do we make good use of technology to enhance our learning and teaching?

A SICSA Education sponsored workshop --- TEL4CS --- will take place at the School of Computing Science in the University of Glasgow on Friday 9th September 2016. Participation is welcomed from teachers and academics at all levels of Computing education. The workshop will be interactive, featuring:

  • Raspberry Pi system development
  • App-based classroom voting
  • Arduino development
  • Interactive Haskell programming tutorials

The workshop runs 1230 to 1630 on Friday 9th September. Please mail jeremy.singer@glasgow.ac.uk to register, so we can finalize numbers for catering.

Workshop Programme

The workshop will start with lunch at 1230 in Sir Alwyn Williams Building, room 423. Talks commence at 1300 in the same location.

1230 Arrival, Lunch SAWB 423
1300 Julie Williamson (Glasgow) Getting Hands on with HCI and Electronics
My key goal in teaching first year human computer interaction (HCI) is to demonstrate the breadth of interesting challenges within HCI, from conceptual design, implementation and signal processing, to quantitative and qualitative evaluation techniques. I hope to disprove the common assumption that HCI is a "soft" topic by giving the students hands on experiences working in a range of HCI challenges. The course will use the Arduino prototyping board, an open source platform for prototyping interactive electronics, to demonstrate key topics in HCI. Using Arduino prototyping boards, first year students will complete a four week lab that gives a taste of four topics: design prototyping, signal processing of human input, quantitative evaluation, and qualitative evaluation. The four week group project will involve creating a tangible reminder system that combines touch input, light output, and a physical object within which to embed this interactivity. Each lab will give students the opportunity to build physical prototypes using the Arduino and complete practical exercises that develop a range of creative and technical HCI skills. This talk will give an overview of how I plan to integrate the Arduino boards into my HCI teaching and a practical demonstration of the lab kits that will be provided to students. The course will begin in late October 2016, so feedback, thoughts, and ideas on the kits and the approach will be most welcome.
1345 Hans-Wolfgang Loidl (Heriot Watt) Using Raspberry Pis for Teaching Systems Programming
In this talk I will present our usage of Raspberry Pis (v2) as hardware platform for teaching core knowledge on systems programming to second year undergraduate students in computer science. I will start with an overview of teaching opportunities offered by these devices, and will then focus on our concrete domain, which is less mainstream compared to the majority of available on-line resources. I will reflect on our original expectations about the course, the concrete outcomes from the course, and general student feedback given on this first time delivery of the course. This talk will include some demo components of using a Pi in the wired configuration that we used for the final coursework, and a sample implementation of this coursework itself.
1430 Coffee break SAWB 423
1500 Niall Barr (Glasgow) Yet Another Classroom Response System
YACRS is a classroom interaction system that allows students to use their own devices (mobile phones, tablets or laptops) to respond to questions during class. The motivation behind developing it was that the clicker systems we use at the University of Glasgow were becomming increasingly problematic - making sure batteries were OK, identifying broken hand-sets and getting them to the right lecture theatre all posed problems. Since almost all stuudents carry a smartphone or other device it seemed logical to replace the clicker system with a web based system.
1545 Jeremy Singer (Glasgow) Massive Open Online Tutorials in Haskell
How do you support thousands of novice programmers and teach them a new language? We are running a Haskell massive open online course (MOOC) at Glasgow, and we want people to experience Haskell without needing to download the full toolchain. We have adapted a web-based interactive Haskell interpreter with custom tutorial scripts. In this live demo, you can try out our tool!
1630 Workshop close

About SICSA Education

The workshop is kindly sponsored by SICSA Education, a special-interest group that focuses on enhancing collaboration across the core activities of undergraduate and postgraduate learning and teaching.