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Often, security topics are only taught in advanced computer science (CS) courses. However, most US R1 universities do not require students to take these courses to complete an undergraduate CS degree. As a result, students can graduate without learning about computer security and secure programming practices. To gauge students’ knowledge and skills of secure programming, we conducted a coding interview with 21 students from two R1 universities in the United States. All the students in our study had at least taken Computer Systems or an equivalent course. We then analyzed the students’ approach to safe programming practices, such as avoiding unsafe functions like gets and strcpy, and basic security knowledge, such as writing code that assumes user inputs can be malicious. Our results suggest that students lack the key fundamental skills to write secure programs. For example, students rarely pay attention to details, such as compiler warnings, and often do not read programming language documentation with care. Moreover, some students’ understanding of memory layout is cursory, which is crucial for writing secure programs. We also found that some students are struggling with even the basics of C programming, even though it is the main language taught in Computer Systems courses.
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An interactive online game that uses simulations of hunting vampire bats to introduce studentsto coding
There is increasing awareness that data science and computational thinking are critical skills for undergraduates to develop but these can be difficult to integrate into undergraduate Biology classes. In this module, we describe how we have used a system for learning the programming language R that focuses on building students? skills and confidence in data exploration, management, and visualization. This activity pairs a hands-on virtual experiment where students simulate animal movements and social interactions to provide a friendly introduction to basic data science for biologists. During the activity, students play the ?Bat Game?, an online game which students access via an internet browser. Each student controls the movement decisions of one bat within a social group. The bats must search for cows they can bite to get a meal of blood. Students take the roles of bats in a series of foraging tasks. Students must follow ?rules? and attempt to match their overall actions to those of their group members under different scenarios. The game platform collects all the locations of all bats in the game. After playing the game, students export the data they just created and analyze it to learn how to detect known patterns through basic summaries and plotting in R. All analyses and programming skills are presented in one cohesive R Markdown file, where students can read about the goals of each coding chunk, can run each chunk, and then answer questions about the biology of the social system as well as basic questions about the code used in the analyses. This approach decouples coding from statistics, assumes no prior knowledge, and uses a charismatic species to incentivize student participation. This module can be used in many courses including lab sections of large-enrollment introductory biology courses as well as smaller upper-level courses
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- PAR ID:
- 10562903
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for Biology Laboratory Education
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advances in Biology Laboratory Education
- ISSN:
- 2769-1810
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.37590/able.v44.art11
