Computer Science Education

For the past several years, I have worked as a research assistant on the NSF ITWF grant "Collaboration through Agile Software Development Practices: A Means for Improvement in Quality and Retention for the IT Workforce." Software devleopment is a highly social process, requiring constant interaction with colleagues, planning sessions, and interaction. By showing students that software development is a collaborative process, we hope to pique their social interests as well as their engineering proclivities.

Primarily, we have focused on the use of agile software development principles to infuse computer science courses with a more collaborative and social atmosphere. We have also supplemented traditional teaching approaches with socially-relevant assignments and projects, rapid feedback and active learning to appeal to a wider variety of students. Our studies have shown that this approach to computer science education is both subjectively more appealing and engaging to a variety of students, including women and minorities, and also removes previously existing disparities in classroom performance between students of different personality types and learning styles.

Please visit our website on Pair Learning through collaboration and pair pair programming!

View the list of my computer science education publications.

Human-Computer Interaction in Software Development

Computer Science Education

Empirical Software Engineering