Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Cpit research month - Monday 13th - Computing presentations

Department of computing has 3 presentations lunch time yesterday.

Alison Clear on the topic of "creating international research opportunities" discussing strategies and networking opportunities for collaborative research to be undertaken. Covered the 'state' of international computing educational research and that in computing, conferences are main dissemination method rather than journals. Introduced Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Research (ITiCSE) has one forum. Working groups are the main method for collaboration whereby academics propose topics, then group participants are selected (through refereed process), work before conference and then have f2f meeting in 2 days before and across 3 days of conference to write a paper to be submitted as a draft at the end of the conference.

Dr. Ed Correia presents on "virtualization: the future". Presented on the virtual environment used at cpit called techlabs. Used to provide students with a realistic platform to complete projects and learning activities. Resource has been progressively built over several years. Presented on current limitations and plans to work through the technical challenges presented by these.

Armit Sarkar and team (Dr. Mike Lance & Mike Lopez ) on "improvements in teaching software engineering" Mike Lance discussed models including learning models. How are models of learning useful? And are models actually of relevance? Mike Lopez proposes to look at how students come to think computationally with one approach to investigate how students come up with misconceptions/alternaive viewpoints and what it takes for them to unravel their misunderstandings and move back onto the right track. Armit then presented on using loops and patterns to helping students learn programming concepts. A teaching resource produced to help novice programmers learn the different ways loops behave.

No comments: