Intelligent Support for Computer Science Education

Intelligent Support for Computer Science Education presents the authors’ research journey into the effectiveness of human tutoring, with the goal of developing educational technology that can be used to improve introductory Computer Science education at the undergraduate level. Nowadays, Computer Science education is central to the concerns of society, as attested by the penetration of information technology in all aspects of our lives; consequently, in the last few years interest in Computer Science at all levels of schooling, especially at the college level, has been flourishing. However, introductory concepts in Computer Science such as data structures and recursion are difficult for novices to grasp.

Key Features:

• Includes a comprehensive and succinct overview of the Computer Science education landscape at all levels of education.
• Provides in-depth analysis of one-on-one human tutoring dialogues in introductory Computer Science at college level.
• Describes a scalable, plug-in based Intelligent Tutoring System architecture, portable to different topics and pedagogical strategies.
• Presents systematic, controlled evaluation of different versions of the system in ecologically valid settings (18 actual classes and their laboratory sessions).
• Provides a time-series analysis of student behavior when interacting with the system.

This book will be of special interest to the Computer Science education community, specifically instructors of introductory courses at the college level, and Advanced Placement (AP) courses at the high school level. Additionally, all the authors’ work is relevant to the Educational Technology community, especially to those working in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, their interfaces, and Educational Data Mining, in particular as applied to human-human pedagogical interactions and to user interaction with educational software.