How Minecraft Affects How Young People Learn About Computer Science

Abstract: As one of the newest art forms available to young people, gaming has become an increasing influence on young people’s education, even if not used in a classroom environment. This talk aims to explore examples of how video games have changed how young people understand and learn about certain subjects, with particular focus on how the indie title Minecraft allows them to learn about the world of Computer Science and how groups are looking to forward the cause of education though games.

Data Science, Microsoft and You

In this session we'll explore how Microsoft uses data science and machine learning across it's entire business, from Windows and Office, to Skype and XBox. We'll look at how companies across the world use Microsoft technology for empowering their businesses in many different industries. And we'll look at data science technologies you can use yourselves, such as Azure Machine Learning and Power BI. Finally we'll discuss job opportunities for data scientists and tips on how you can be successful!

Research plan discussion: The socio-technical construction of MOOCs and educator practices in HE

In this seminar slot, we will discuss Steve's research aims and plan. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have received substantial coverage in mainstream sources, academic media, and scholarly journals, both negative and positive. Numerous articles have addressed their potential impact on Higher Education systems in general, and some have highlighted problems with the instructional quality of MOOCs, and the lack of attention to research from online learning and distance education literature in MOOC design. However, few studies have looked at the relationship between social change and the construction of MOOCs within higher education, particularly in terms of educator and learning designer practices. This study aims to use the analytical strategy of Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STIN) to explore the extent to which MOOCs are socially shaped and their relationship to educator and learning designer practices. The study involves a multi-site case study of 3 UK MOOC-producing universities and aims to capture an empirically based, nuanced understanding of the extent to which MOOCs are socially constructed in particular contexts, and the social implications of MOOCs, especially among educators and learning designers.

Estudio y Análisis del Curso Europeo de Informática ECS (European Computer Science).

Resumen tomado de la publicación

A scaled-down conference model for courses covering ever-changing fields in computer science undergraduate degree programs

Resumen tomado de la publicación

Cloud computing in e-science: research challenges and opportunities

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), workflow, the Semantic Web, and Grid computing are key enabling information technologies in the development of increasingly sophisticated e-Science infrastructures and application platforms. While the emergence of Cloud computing as a new computing paradigm has provided new directions and opportunities for e-Science infrastructure development, it also presents some challenges. Scientific research is increasingly finding that it is difficult to handle “big data” using traditional data processing techniques. Such challenges demonstrate the need for a comprehensive analysis on using the above mentioned informatics techniques to develop appropriate e-Science infrastructure and platforms in the context of Cloud computing. This survey paper describes recent research advances in applying informatics techniques to facilitate scientific research particularly from the Cloud computing perspective. Our particular contributions include identifying associated research challenges and opportunities, presenting lessons learned, and describing our future vision for applying Cloud computing to e-Science. We believe our research findings can help indicate the future trend of e-Science, and can inform funding and research directions in how to more appropriately employ computing technologies in scientific research. We point out the open research issues hoping to spark new development and innovation in the e-Science field.

On Occurrence Of Plagiarism In Published Computer Science Thesis Reports At Swedish Universities

In recent years, it has been observed that software clones and plagiarism are becoming an increased threat for one?s creativity. Clones are the results of copying and using other?s work. According to the Merriam – Webster dictionary, “A clone is one that appears to be a copy of an original form”. It is synonym to duplicate. Clones lead to redundancy of codes, but not all redundant code is a clone.On basis of this background knowledge ,in order to safeguard one?s idea and to avoid intentional code duplication for pretending other?s work as if their owns, software clone detection should be emphasized more. The objective of this paper is to review the methods for clone detection and to apply those methods for finding the extent of plagiarism occurrence among the Swedish Universities in Master level computer science department and to analyze the results.The rest part of the paper, discuss about software plagiarism detection which employs data analysis technique and then statistical analysis of the results.Plagiarism is an act of stealing and passing off the idea?s and words of another person?s as one?s own. Using data analysis technique, samples(Master level computer Science thesis report) were taken from various Swedish universities and processed in Ephorus anti plagiarism software detection. Ephorus gives the percentage of plagiarism for each thesis document, from this results statistical analysis were carried out using Minitab Software.The results gives a very low percentage of Plagiarism extent among the Swedish universities, which concludes that Plagiarism is not a threat to Sweden?s standard of education in computer science.This paper is based on data analysis, intelligence techniques, EPHORUS software plagiarism detection tool and MINITAB statistical software analysis.

Turning math attractive to computer science students: an application-to-model approach

This paper describes an innovative approach to develop the understanding about the relevance of mathematics to computer science. The mathematical subjects are introduced through an application-to-model scheme that lead computer science students to a better understanding of why they have to learn math and learn it effectively. Our approach consists of a single one semester course, taught at the first semester of the program, where the students are initially exposed to some typical computer applications. When they recognize the applications' complexity, the instructor gives the mathematical models supporting such applications, even before a formal introduction to the model in a math course. We applied this approach at Unesp (Brazil) and the results include a large reduction in the rate of students that abandon the college and better students in the final years of our program.

A flexible curriculum for computer science undergraduate major

This paper describes an innovative approach to establish a CS curriculum, aiming flexibility and minimization of the time spent in the classrooms. This approach has been developed at the Paulista State University - Unesp - at São José do Rio Preto, and is producing very interesting results. The load reduction is achieved through a series of fundamental core and breadth courses that precede depth courses in specific areas. The flexibility comes as a side effect of the depth courses, which can be adapted without any changes in the core courses. In the following pages we fully describe our motivations, actions and results.