A Project-Based Collaboration between Software Engineering and Criminology Students: Building Applications to Understand Racial Injustice in the Criminal Justice System.
Title: A Project-Based Collaboration between Software Engineering and Criminology Students: Building Applications to Understand Racial Injustice in the Criminal Justice System.
Undergraduate software engineering courses typically require students to work on team-based projects that reinforce disciplinary content and soft skills. At the same time, these students, particularly those at liberal arts institutions, are required to take courses that focus on civic issues, including on racial and ethnic inequality. Often, students perceive these courses to be outside their disciplinary areas, and may not comprehend how these topics are applicable to computer science and software engineering. This paper reports on the experience of Pulimood and Leigey as they and their students grappled with issues of racial injustice in the criminal justice system, and drew upon their own disciplinary backgrounds to apply computational thinking and software engineering principles to help the community better understand these issues and advocate for reform. The paper also describes the experience of teaching courses from different disciplines in a collaborative model, working closely with a local community partner to support its work on an identified social issue, and the learning outcomes, as well as the benefits and challenges of this approach. Recommendations and future directions are also discussed. more »« less
Chow, Scott P.; Komarlu, Tanay; Conrad, Phillip T.
(, ITICSE 2021)
null
(Ed.)
Students’ experience with software testing in undergraduate computing courses is often relatively shallow, as compared to the importance of the topic. This experience report describes introducing industrial-strength testing into CMPSC 156, an upper division course in software engineering at UC Santa Barbara . We describe our efforts to modify our software engineering course to introduce rigorous test-coverage requirements into full-stack web development projects, requirements similar to those the authors had experienced in a professional software development setting. We present student feedback on the course and coverage metrics for the projects. We reflect on what about these changes worked (or didn’t), and provide suggestions for other instructors that would like to give their students a deeper experience with software testing in their software engineering courses.
Salerno, Larissa; de França Tonhão, Simone; Steinmacher, Igor; Treude, Christoph
(, ACM)
Open source software (OSS) development offers a unique opportunity for students in Software Engineering to experience and participate in large-scale software development, however, the impact of such courses on students' self-efficacy and the challenges faced by students are not well understood. This paper aims to address this gap by analyzing data from multiple instances of OSS development courses at universities in different countries and reporting on how students' self-efficacy changed as a result of taking the course, as well as the barriers and challenges faced by students.
Sharbine, Mackenzie B.; Huff, James L.; Sochacka, Nicola W.; Walther, Joachim
(, Proceedings of the Research in Engineering Education Symposium & Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference)
BACKGROUND Previous work has identified the reality of structural constraints placed on engineering students from underrepresented gender, racial, or ethnic backgrounds, a process known as minoritization. Students from minoritized and marginalized backgrounds are often expected to overcome additional obstacles in order to be successful in engineering or to claim identity as an engineer. Such a cultural backdrop contributes to the experience of professional shame, which has not yet been characterized in the lived experiences of engineering students who identify with minoritized backgrounds. PURPOSE We contend that professional shame is a major factor in both creating and perpetuating cycles of marginalization that inhibit students from forming a professional identity as an engineer or succeeding in their academic program. Anchored in theoretical foundations of psychology and sociology, we define professional shame as a painful emotional experience that occurs when individuals perceive themselves to be wholly inadequate in relation to identity-relevant standards within a professional domain. In this paper, we examine the lived experiences of professional shame in undergraduate engineering students in the United States who identify with racial, gender, or ethnic backgrounds that are minoritized within the structural constraints of their engineering programs. METHODS To answer our research question: How do students from minoritized gender, racial or ethnic backgrounds experience professional shame within the context of engineering education? We conducted an interpretative methodological analysis (IPA). Specifically, we conducted semi-structured interviews with junior engineering majors (n = 7) from two predominantly white institutions (PWIs) who self-identified as being from a minoritized gender, racial, or ethnic background. We found IPA to be especially effective in answering our research question while affirming the nuances of the diversity found in our participants’ gender, racial and ethnic backgrounds. We carefully analyzed the interview transcripts, generating descriptive, linguistic, and contextual comments. These comments informed multiple emergent themes for each participant, which were subsequently integrated into robust themes that characterized the psychological experiences shared by all participants. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS Our findings are summarized in four robust, psychological themes. First, minoritized identities were salient in moments of professional shame. Second, in response to professional shame, students sought out confirmation of belonging within the engineering space. Third, their perception of engineering as an exceptionally difficult major that required exceptional smartness intensified the shame experience. And, finally, participants experienced a tension between wanting to adhere to engineering stereotypes and wanting to diverge from or alter engineering stereotypes. SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPLICATIONS Through examining participants’ experiences of shame and subsequent struggle to belong and claim identity as an engineer, we seek to address efforts in bolstering diversity, equity, and inclusion that may be hindered by the permeation of professional shame in the experience of minoritized students. We see these findings as critical in giving insight on how minoritization occurs and so that equity can become a systemic objective for everyone in the engineering community rather than the burden only on the shoulders of those who are marginalized by the community.
Davishahl, Eric; Booker, Anna Fay; McDonnell-Ingoglia, Petra; Burnett, Pat
(, 2024 ASEE Annual Conference)
This NSF-IUSE project began in fall 2022 and features cross-disciplinary collaboration between faculty in engineering, math, history, English, and physics to design, pilot, and assess a new learning community approach to welcome precalculus level students into an engineering transfer degree program. The learning community spans two academic quarters and includes six different courses. The place-based curriculum includes contextualized precalculus and English composition, Pacific Northwest history, orientation to the engineering profession, and introductory skills such as problem-solving, computer programming, and team-based design. The program also features community-engaged project-based learning in the first quarter and a course-based undergraduate research experience in the second quarter, both with an overarching theme of energy and water resources. The approach leverages multiple high-impact educational practices to promote deep conceptual learning, motivate foundational skill development, explore social relevance and connection, and ultimately seeks to strengthen our students’ engineering identity, sense of belonging, and general academic preparation for success in an engineering major. Fall 2023 marked the first quarter of piloting the new learning community with a cohort of 19 students out of a capacity limit of 24. This paper reports on the demographics of the first cohort and compares them to enrollment in a parallel section of our Introduction to Engineering course that is not linked. We also share some of the students’ reasons for enrolling and their feedback on the experience. We found that students in populations with intensive entry advising such as International Programs and Running Start (a high school dual-enrollment program) appear to be overrepresented in the first cohort. This finding correlates with a theme in nearly all student responses that they learned about the program through advising. Finally, we describe some example activities and student projects that illustrate how the curriculum design integrates content across the academic disciplines involved.
There is an increasing recognition among institutions of higher education of the important role that community colleges play in educating future engineers and scientists, especially students from traditionally underrepresented groups. Two-plus-two programs and articulation agreements between community colleges and four-year institutions are growing, allowing community college students to take their lower-division courses at local community colleges and then transfer to a university to complete their baccalaureate degrees. For many small community colleges, however, developing a comprehensive transfer engineering program that prepares students to be competitive for transfer can be challenging due to a lack of facilities, resources, and local expertise. As a result, many community college students transfer without completing the necessary courses for transfer, making timely completion of degrees difficult. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program (NSF IUSE), three community colleges from Northern California collaborated to develop resources and alternative teaching strategies to enable small-to-medium community college engineering programs to support a comprehensive set of lower-division engineering courses that are delivered either completely online, or with limited face-to-face interactions. The biggest challenge in developing such strategies lies in designing and implementing courses that have lab components. This paper focuses on the development and testing of the teaching and learning resources for Engineering Graphics, which is a four-unit course (three units of lecture and one unit of lab) covering the principles of engineering drawings, computer-aided design (using both AutoCAD and SolidWorks), and the engineering design process. The paper also presents the results of the implementation of the curriculum, as well as a comparison of the outcomes of the online course with those from a regular, face-to-face course. Student performance on labs and tests in the two parallel sections of the course are compared. Additionally student surveys and interviews, conducted in both the online and face-to-face course are used to document and compare students’ perceptions of their learning experience, the effectiveness of the course resources, their use of these resources, and their overall satisfaction with the course.
Pulimood, S. Monisha, Leigey, Margaret, Bates, Diane C., Pearson, Kim, and Mishra, Supriya. A Project-Based Collaboration between Software Engineering and Criminology Students: Building Applications to Understand Racial Injustice in the Criminal Justice System.. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10328088. Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Joint Track on Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-JSEET '22) .
Pulimood, S. Monisha, Leigey, Margaret, Bates, Diane C., Pearson, Kim, & Mishra, Supriya. A Project-Based Collaboration between Software Engineering and Criminology Students: Building Applications to Understand Racial Injustice in the Criminal Justice System.. Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Joint Track on Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-JSEET '22), (). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10328088.
Pulimood, S. Monisha, Leigey, Margaret, Bates, Diane C., Pearson, Kim, and Mishra, Supriya.
"A Project-Based Collaboration between Software Engineering and Criminology Students: Building Applications to Understand Racial Injustice in the Criminal Justice System.". Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Joint Track on Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-JSEET '22) (). Country unknown/Code not available. https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10328088.
@article{osti_10328088,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {A Project-Based Collaboration between Software Engineering and Criminology Students: Building Applications to Understand Racial Injustice in the Criminal Justice System.},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10328088},
abstractNote = {Undergraduate software engineering courses typically require students to work on team-based projects that reinforce disciplinary content and soft skills. At the same time, these students, particularly those at liberal arts institutions, are required to take courses that focus on civic issues, including on racial and ethnic inequality. Often, students perceive these courses to be outside their disciplinary areas, and may not comprehend how these topics are applicable to computer science and software engineering. This paper reports on the experience of Pulimood and Leigey as they and their students grappled with issues of racial injustice in the criminal justice system, and drew upon their own disciplinary backgrounds to apply computational thinking and software engineering principles to help the community better understand these issues and advocate for reform. The paper also describes the experience of teaching courses from different disciplines in a collaborative model, working closely with a local community partner to support its work on an identified social issue, and the learning outcomes, as well as the benefits and challenges of this approach. Recommendations and future directions are also discussed.},
journal = {Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Joint Track on Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-JSEET '22)},
author = {Pulimood, S. Monisha and Leigey, Margaret and Bates, Diane C. and Pearson, Kim and Mishra, Supriya},
}
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