Welcome to the Eleventh Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2009). This year, the ACE2009 conference, which is part of the Australasian Computer Science Week, is being held in Wellington, New Zealand from January 19 to January 23, 2009.
We can truly call this an international conference with 77 authors coming from Malaysia, Taiwan, China, Finland, England, United States, Greece, Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia. The Chairs would like to thank the Program Committee for their excellent efforts in the double-blind reviewing process which resulted in the selection of 18 full papers from the 40 papers submitted, giving an acceptance rate of 45%.
Our keynote speaker is Professor Mark Guzdial from Georgia Tech, author of several books including "Introduction to Computing and Programming with Python: A Multimedia Approach." He is currently vice-chair of the ACM Education Board and is a prominent member of SIGCSE, being the Symposium Co-Chair for SIGCSE 2009. For two days prior to our conference, we have organized a workshop partly sponsored by SIGCSE on "Contextualised Approaches to Computing Education". The presenters, Mark Guzdial and his wife Barbara Ericson, will cover several different contextualized approaches, including media computation, robotics and engineering approaches to CS1.
The topics of ACE2009 papers and presentations include taxonomies, classifications, studies of novice programming students, the use of technology in education, course content, curriculum structure, methods of assessment, mobile, flexible, online learning, and evaluations of alternative approaches to computing education. The high quality papers this year continue to push the frontiers of opportunities for research and innovation in computing education, and this conference will enable these educators to meet and share their experiences in a new forum. We will be holding a Second Life Panel where we will attempt to stream SL to the Conference room and connect Melbourne, Auckland and Nelson to showcase SL in action.
In keeping with the ACE tradition, there will be a post-conference workshop continuing to build research in Australasian computing education. Five years ago in Dunedin, New Zealand, we held the first BRACE workshop, and this year, on the return to New Zealand we are continuing the tradition by holding a BRACElet workshop.
Proceeding Downloads
Contextualized computing education of programming
One of the most powerful tools for improving success rates in introductory computing courses is the incorporation of context -- a theme that pervades the computing lectures, assignments, and examples which relates the content to a concrete application ...
A perspective on the International Olympiad in Informatics for CS educators
At the 2008 International Olympiad in Informatics held in Cairo, the Australian and New Zealand teams had their best ever performances. This talk will give details of the Informatics competition, and how teams are supported in Australia and New Zealand. ...
The BRACElet 2009.1 (Wellington) specification
BRACElet is a multi-institutional computer education research study of novice programmers. The project is open to new members. The purpose of this paper is to: (1) provide potential new members with an overview of BRACElet, and (2) specify the common ...
Second Life panel
There are many interesting uses of the virtual world in Second Life for Computing Education. The panel members are involved in tertiary education and use Second Life as their medium, both for teaching and research purposes. However, the session is an ...
An exploration of internal factors influencing student learning of programming
This paper explores internal factors influencing student learning of programming. This is based on literature relating to student learning and learning of programming. Two dimensions: motivation and capability are used as a framework to explore the data ...
Intervention programmes to recruit female computing students: why do the programme champions do it?
This paper looks at intervention programmes to improve the representation of female students in computing education and the computer industry. A multiple case study methodology was used to look at major intervention programmes conducted in Australia. ...
Teaching and assessing programming strategies explicitly
This paper describes how programming strategies were explicitly instructed and assessed in an introductory programming course and describes the impact of this curricular change. A description is given of how strategies were explicitly integrated into ...
Quality of student contributed questions using PeerWise
PeerWise is an online tool that involves students in the process of creating, sharing, answering and discussing multiple choice questions. Previous work has shown that students voluntarily use the large repository of questions developed by their peers ...
Easing the transition: a collaborative learning approach
Engaging first year students is a difficult problem, as students must develop independent study skills while concurrently mastering their chosen topic. At the same time, they find themselves in an alien environment, removed from their peer group and ...
Losing their marbles: syntax-free programming for assessing problem-solving skills
Novice programmers have difficulty developing an algorithmic solution while simultaneously obeying the syntactic constraints of the target programming language. To see how students fare in algorithmic problem solving when not burdened by syntax, we ...
Human fallibility: how well do human markers agree?
Marker bias and inconsistency are widely seen as problems in the field of assessment. Various institutions have put in place a practice of second and even third marking to promote fairness. However, we were able to find very little evidence, rather than ...
A focus group study of student attitudes to lectures
This paper reports on the findings from focus groups, conducted at Macquarie University, on the attitudes of computing students to lectures. Students felt that two things were vital for a good lecture: (1) that the lecturer goes beyond what is written ...
What our ICT graduates really need from us: a perspective from the workplace
A national Discipline-Based Initiative (DBI) project for Information and Communications Technology (ICT), funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, has sought the opinions of recent graduates of ICT in the workplace to help inform the ...
Evolution of an international collaborative student project
International collaborative student projects are inherently difficult for everyone concerned -- the students working on the projects, the faculty guiding the students, and the clients submitting the projects. With more and more schools recommending, or ...
A citation analysis of the ICER 2005--07 proceedings
This paper identifies the most commonly cited conferences, journals and books of the 43 papers within the first three ICER proceedings. A large array of conferences, journals, and books were cited. However, only a small set of journals and conferences ...
How students develop concurrent programs
This paper describes a qualitative, explorative study of how students approach developing and testing concurrent programs. The study is based on interviews with students working on the final programming assignment in a concurrent programming course. We ...
Issues regarding threshold concepts in computer science
Threshold Concepts deserve discussion and reflection in Computer Science Education; they provide a conceptual framework intended to re-empower tertiary educators. At this stage, the idea of Threshold Concepts raises plenty of questions, promises renewed ...
A taxonomic study of novice programming summative assessment
Learning to program is difficult, a situation that is largely responsible for high attrition rates in Computer Science schools. Novice programmers struggle to grasp an early understanding of programming, which can lead to frustration and eventually ...
Ten years of the Australasian Computing Education Conference
The Australasian Computing Education Conference is now in its eleventh year. This paper charts the ups and downs of the conference from its origin in 1996, through its troubled years, to its recent apparently steady state. All 328 papers from the ten ...
Surely we must learn to read before we learn to write!
While analysing students' marks in some comparable code-reading and code-writing questions on a beginners' programming exam, we observed that the weaker students appeared to be able to write code with markedly more success than they could read it. ...
A people-first approach to programming
Students continue to find learning to program difficult. Failure rates from introductory programming units are high, as are attrition rates from IT courses.
Case studies were conducted in 2007 involving Queensland University of Technology (QUT) ...
Experiences in teaching quality attribute scenarios
The concept of the quality attribute scenario was introduced in 2003 to support the development of software architectures. This concept is useful because it provides an operational means to represent the quality requirements of a system. It also ...
Index Terms
Proceedings of the Eleventh Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 95