The CRA Bulletin frequently shares news, timely information about CRA initiatives, and items of interest to the general community.
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Information on educational initiatives.
The CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award honors faculty members in computing who have made a significant impact on students they have mentored. It recognizes those who have provided exceptional mentorship and undergraduate research experiences and, in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of these students to research-focused graduate programs in computing.
The Computing Research Association is pleased to announce the annual CRA Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers, which recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. The award is a wonderful way to recognize your best student researchers and your department.
The fourth (and last NSF-funded) New Computing Faculty Workshops will be held August 5-10, 2018 in San Diego. The goal of the workshops is to help new computing faculty to be better and more efficient teachers. By learning a little about teaching, we will help new faculty (a) make their teaching more efficient and effective and (b) make their teaching more enjoyable. We want students to learn more and teachers to have fun teaching them.
CRA’s Education Committee (CRA-E) has recently selected its 2018 CRA-E Graduate Fellow – Robert (“Rob”) Bowden. Rob is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Harvard University. After earning his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 2013, he spent a year working as the course preceptor for Harvard’s CS50 course, and then returned to graduate school with Margo Seltzer as his adviser. Rob’s Ph.D. research includes work on file systems and code synthesis. His current work focuses on how to use the vast amount of CS50 solutions generated by students to not only detect errors in student programs but also propose ways to fix them. Rob’s goal is to advance automated program repair of buggy solutions to introductory programming assignments.
Last fall, the CRA Education Committee added a new resource to its website for “Teaching Computer Science: Capacity Building and Scaling.” Across the United States and Canada, universities and colleges are facing significant increases in undergraduate computer science (CS) enrollments. This surge has exceeded all previous CS program booms and there is a general sense that the current enrollment growth is substantially different than that of the mid-1980s and late 1990s. CRA’s Generation CS Study provides excellent insight into enrollment trends and their impact on computer science units, diversity, enrollment management strategies, and more.
CRA-E’s new “Undergraduate Research Highlights” series showcases outstanding research done by undergraduate students at universities and colleges across North America. Each article features the story of a successful undergraduate researcher and offers personal insights into their experiences with finding an advisor, undertaking new research projects, and discovering how research can impact their personal and professional futures.
In addition to honoring exceptionally successful students, these awards identify some of the departments that are particularly effective at cultivating and promoting undergraduate research. A total of 94 colleges and universities have nominated students during the last three years.
The Education Committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA-E) is proud to announce two recipients of the 2018 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award: Michael Ernst from the University of Washington in Seattle and Catherine Putonti from Loyola University in Chicago.
The CRA Education Committee is now accepting applications for the CRA-E Graduate Fellows Program. The program provides opportunities for Ph.D. candidates in computing fields to contribute to CRA-E projects, network with computer science education advocates on the committee, engage in advocacy for mentoring undergraduate students and promote undergraduate research and education at the national level.
The sessions will focus on how teaching faculty can strategize their involvement in departmental as well as research activities, different forms of scholarship and leadership activities to pursue, and best practices for success, promotion, and advancement.
This award program honors faculty members in computing who have made a significant impact on students they have mentored. The CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award recognizes faculty members who have provided exceptional mentorship and undergraduate research experiences and, in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of these students to research-focused graduate programs in computing.
Engaging undergraduates in research can be an effective way to increase their confidence, perception of science, and sense of belonging. But at many large research universities, it can be difficult for undergraduate students—especially early undergraduates—to find research opportunities. Furthermore, even when they find opportunities, they might not have the background, training, or support to be successful. These issues are particularly acute for women and other underrepresented groups in computer science as they tend to have less pre-college computer science experience.
The Computing Research Association’s Education Committee (CRA-E) is excited to announce a new and improved version of its Conquer website (conquer.cra.org) for CS undergraduates interested in research and graduate school. The site also has resources for faculty who are interested in mentoring undergraduate research and helping their students apply to graduate school.
Given the convergence of burgeoning enrollments in CS across many universities and colleges in the United States and the need to re-imagine the way computer science is taught to address 21st century challenges, the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University is hosting a 2-day summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, pending anticipated funding.
At the CRA Education Committee (CRA-E) meeting in June, Lori Pollock (University of Delaware) stepped up to replace Ran Libeskind-Hadas (Harvey Mudd College) as CRA-E co-chair. She will join current co-chair Susanne Hambrusch (Purdue University), and Ran will remain a member of the CRA-E committee.
Today, more than 50,000 high school students will take the inaugural Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP-CSP) exam. Ruthe Farmer, former senior policy advisor for Tech Inclusion in the White House explains why this is such a significant milestone for computer science education in an article in the Huffington Post.
As a little girl growing up in the Dominican Republic, Yerika Jimenez, currently a Ph.D. student in computing at the University of Florida, noticed she had a knack for fixing things – cell phones, TVs, radios. Everyone in her community would bring her broken items, and she would return them repaired. A few years later, when Jimenez was nine years old, her family settled in New Jersey, and her fascination with technology continued.
CRA’s Education Committee (CRA-E) is pleased to welcome its new 2017 CRA-E Graduate Student Fellow – Booma Sowkarthiga Balasubramani. The Graduate Fellows Program was established in 2015 to give graduate students the opportunity to contribute to CRA-E projects, engage in advocacy for mentoring undergraduate students, and promote computer science research and undergraduate education at the national level.
Since I started graduate school in 1997, I have considered myself a member of the programming languages research community — and I continue to attend and publish in the annual conferences of this vibrant computing subfield. But over the last 5-10 years, I have also found myself increasingly passionate about opportunities for computing researchers to focus on ways to influence computing education beyond, for those of us who are academics, our own classrooms and independent studies. Let me share some of the projects I have enjoyed (seriously!) and others I wish I had more time to pursue.
Generation CS: Computer Science Undergraduate Enrollments Surge Since 2006 Across the United States and Canada, universities and colleges are facing a significant increase in enrollment in both undergraduate computer science (CS) courses and programs. The current enrollment surge has exceeded previous CS booms, and there is a general sense that the current growth in enrollment […]
A paper from CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) was recently named an “Exemplary paper” in the 2017 SIGCSE Proceedings. New this year, the SIGCSE program chairs recognized a new category of the top 25% of accepted papers as “Exemplary papers”, highlighted for their accomplishment of high quality, novelty and broad appeal to […]
The Education Committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA-E) is proud to announce three winners of the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award. Congratulations to the 2017 award recipients: Margaret Burnett from Oregon State University, Nayda Santiago from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus, and Margo Seltzer from Harvard University. These outstanding individuals are recognized for providing exceptional mentorship, undergraduate […]
In CERP’s 2015 Data Buddies survey, computing majors were asked whether they had thought about changing to a non-computing major during the past year. Thirteen percent of students who responded to this question said that they had. The word clouds here were created using students’ comments about the reasons they considered leaving computing and factors that helped them stay. Some of the most frequently encountered words in students’ reasons for considering leaving computing were “classes”, “hard”, “difficult”, “work”, and “time”. On the other hand, students’ responses regarding the factors that helped them stay in computing contained words such as “job”, “degree”, and “friends”.
The Computing Research Association Education Committee (CRA-E) is now accepting applications for the CRA-E Graduate Fellows Program. The program provides opportunities for Ph.D. candidates in computing fields to contribute to CRA-E projects, network with computer science education advocates on the committee, engage in advocacy for mentoring undergraduate students and promote undergraduate research and education at the national level.
CRA-E plans to appoint up to two graduate fellows per year, who will serve as members of the committee, providing a voice for graduate students. The fellows will attend the annual CRA-E meeting (travel expenses funded by CRA-E), serve on a CRA-E subcommittee related to their interests and expertise, and contribute to the CRA-E Conquer site that provides resources for undergraduate research and applying to graduate school.
This year’s nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use.
A recent White House blog post by Ruthe Farmer, Senior Policy Advisor for Tech Inclusion, emphasizes that Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) is an opportunity to join the #CSforAll movement and give every student the opportunity to learn computer science. On that note, with the kick off of CSEdWeek yesterday, the White House released a fact sheet detailing the great scope of CS for All efforts, including a new CSforAll program solicitation from NSF called Computer Science for All: Researcher Practitioner Partnerships (CS for All: RPP).
The eighth annual Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) will be held next week, December 5 – 11. CSEdWeek is “a call to action to raise awareness of computer science education and computing careers for students, educators, and the public.” This is a great opportunity to raise awareness about the impact of computing and the critical need for computer science education. Originally conceived by the Computing in the Core coalition, Code.org organizes CSEdWeek as a grassroots campaign supported by 350 partners and 100,000 educators worldwide.
The CRA Education Committee (CRA-E) hosts a series of workshops on Engaging Undergraduates in Research at major computer science research conferences. The next workshop titled “Best Practices in Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Supercomputing,” will be held at Supercomputing 2016 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The workshop will run as BoF session on Wednesday, November 16, 5:15-7 pm and is run by Nancy Amato (Texas A&M) and CRA-E Fellow Max Grossman (Rice University).
Back in January the Computer Science Teacher Association (CSTA), the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM), and Code.org announced an initiative to develop a K-12 Computer Science Framework for use throughout the country’s education system. The plan was to develop a high level framework, not education standards, that states and school districts could use to create individual CS curriculums for their needs and wants. On Monday, the group, which now includes Cyber Innovation Center and the National Math and Science Initiative, announced that they had completed their work and made the framework public.
CRA’s newest award program honors faculty members in computing who have made a significant impact on students they have mentored. The CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award recognizes faculty members who have provided exceptional mentorship and undergraduate research experiences and, in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of these students to research-focused graduate programs in computing.
