ITiCSE 2018
23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE Companion 2018)
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23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE Companion 2018), July 2–4, 2018, Larnaca, Cyprus

ITiCSE 2018 – Proceedings Companion

Contents - Abstracts - Authors
Title Page


Message from the Chairs
In these proceedings, we present reports from the Working Groups that convened at the 23rd Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), held at the University of Central Lancashire Cyprus, Larnaca, Cyprus from June 30 to July 4 2018.
The concept of Working Groups is unique to the ITiCSE conference. A Working Group comprises a team of 5 to 10 researchers who work together on a project related to computing education. Working Groups provide a wonderful opportunity to work intensively on a topic of interest with an international group of computing education researchers. Working groups begin work electronically before the ITiCSE conference. They convene for face-to-face work on the Friday evening before the conference, work together on the Saturday and Sunday, and continue working throughout the three days of the conference. At the end of the conference, the groups submit a draft report and a few weeks after the conference they submit a final report for review. If the report is accepted, the groups revise it based on the reviewers' comments and suggestions for the camera-ready version.
In 2018, 14 proposals for Working Groups were received and nine Working Groups were selected by the Working Group chairs to convene at ITiCSE 2018. Participants presented their results to conference attendees at one of two special working group presentation sessions. Their final reports were double blind reviewed by at least three selected expert reviewers, and we are proud that all nine reports were selected for publication in these proceedings for the ACM Digital Library.
The Working Group reports cover diverse topics: a comparison of student and academic perspectives of student engagement, a proposal of a meta-discipline for cybersecurity education, a systematic literature refiew on introductory programming, concerns about transitioning into higher education computing, development of a cloud computing curriculum, a competency model for computing education, predicting academic performance, a look at the Internet of Things in computing education, and propagating the adoption of CS educational innovations.

Contrasting CS Student and Academic Perspectives and Experiences of Student Engagement
Michael Morgan, Matthew Butler, Jane Sinclair, Christabel Gonsalvez, and Neena Thota
(Monash University, Australia; University of Warwick, UK; University of Massachusetts, USA)
There is widespread acceptance of the use of national benchmarks to measure student engagement, including the North American National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in the USA and Canada, the Student Experience Survey (SES) in Australia, and the United Kingdom Engagement Survey (UKES). The performance of Computer Science (CS) on these benchmarks has generally been poor over a number of years and is consistently low across a range of instruments with little sign of improvement. It is difficult to argue that the technical nature of the CS discipline is the issue as related STEM disciplines consistently rate higher on many measures. Given the deteriorating performance of CS across multiple student engagement instruments, the urgency of addressing this issue is increasing. Missing from computing education research on this issue to date is the CS student voice and a deeper understanding of why CS students rate their experience so poorly. It is essential to seek the perspectives of both sides of the dialogue primarily responsible for creating the student experience. We carried out an in-depth analysis of student perspectives and experiences relating to their engagement in CS courses and compared it to the perspectives and experiences of CS academics. The outcome of this Working Group was a better understanding of areas of difference between CS students and academics on: what constitutes student engagement; who is responsible for student engagement; examples of both positive and negative engagement experiences in the classroom; and current initiatives to improve student engagement in their CS courses.

Publisher's Version
Global Perspectives on Cybersecurity Education for 2030: A Case for a Meta-discipline
Allen Parrish, John Impagliazzo, Rajendra K. Raj, Henrique Santos, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Audun Jøsang, Teresa Pereira, and Eliana Stavrou
(Mississippi State University, USA; Hofstra University, USA; Rochester Institute of Technology, USA; University of Minho, Portugal; University of Auckland, New Zealand; University of Oslo, Norway; Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Portugal; UCLan Cyprus, Cyprus)
Information security has been an area of research and teaching within various computing disciplines in higher education almost since the beginnings of modern computers. The need for security in computing curricula has steadily grown over this period. Recently, with an emerging global crisis, because of the limitations of security within the nascent information technology infrastructure, the field of "cybersecurity" is emerging with international interest and support. Recent evolution of cybersecurity shows that it has begun to take shape as a true academic perspective, as opposed to simply being a training domain for certain specialized jobs. This report starts from the premise that cybersecurity is a "meta-discipline." That is, cybersecurity is used as an aggregate label for a wide variety of similar disciplines, much in the same way that the terms "engineering" and "computing" are commonly used. Thus, cybersecurity should be formally interpreted as a meta-discipline with a variety of disciplinary variants, also characterized through a generic competency model. The intention is that this simple organizational concept will improve the clarity with which the field matures, resulting in improved standards and goals for many different types of cybersecurity programs.

Publisher's Version
Introductory Programming: A Systematic Literature Review
Andrew Luxton-Reilly, Simon, Ibrahim Albluwi, Brett A. Becker, Michail Giannakos, Amruth N. Kumar, Linda Ott, James Paterson, Michael James Scott, Judy Sheard, and Claudia Szabo
(University of Auckland, New Zealand; University of Newcastle, Australia; Princeton University, USA; University College Dublin, Ireland; NTNU, Norway; Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA; Michigan Technological University, USA; Glasgow Caledonian University, UK; Falmouth University, UK; Monash University, Australia; University of Adelaide, Australia)
As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming.
This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research.

Publisher's Version
An International Investigation into Student Concerns regarding Transition into Higher Education Computing
Mark Zarb, Bedour Alshaigy, Dennis Bouvier, Richard Glassey, Janet Hughes, and Charles Riedesel
(Robert Gordon University, UK; Oxford-Brookes University, UK; Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, USA; KTH, Sweden; Open University, UK; University of Nebraska, USA)
The experience of transitioning into and starting higher education is very much an individual one, with some applicants viewing the prospect of higher education as an unknown entity. For those who are first in their family or community to consider higher education, it can seem to be an "alien environment". This is just one of the issues that lead to applicants experiencing levels of concern when considering a transition into higher education. This international working group aims to answer the following research question: "What are the concerns that computing students have with regards to their transition into higher education?" A survey was administered and the results evaluated.

Publisher's Version
Cloud Computing: Developing Contemporary Computer Science Curriculum for a Cloud-First Future
Derek Foster, Laurie White, Joshua Adams, D. Cenk Erdil, Harvey Hyman, Stan Kurkovsky, Majd Sakr, and Lee Stott
(University of Lincoln, UK; Google, USA; Saint Leo University, USA; Sacred Heart University, USA; University of South Florida, USA; Central Connecticut State University, USA; Carnegie Mellon University, USA; Microsoft, UK)
Cloud Computing adoption has seen significant growth over the last five years. It offers a diverse range of scalable and redundant service deployment models, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS). These models are applied to areas such as IoT, Cyber-Physical Systems, Social Media, Data Science, Media Streaming, Ecommerce, and Health Informatics. The growth in cloud presents challenges for companies to source cloud expertise to support their business, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises with limited resources. The UK Government recently published the Digital Skills Crisis report, identifying skill-set challenges facing industry, with a shortage in cloud skills negatively impacting business. While cloud technologies have evolved at significant pace, the development of Computer Science curriculum in the further and higher education sector has lagged behind. The challenges faced in the sector includes the training of educators, institutional gaps (software and hardware policies), regulatory constraints, and access to cloud platforms. By embedding fundamental cloud skills throughout the educator and student journey, both stakeholders will be better positioned to understand and practically apply the use of appropriate cloud services, and produce graduates to support the needs of industry. This working group has carried out work to: i) assess current cloud computing curricula in CS and similar programs, ii) document industry needs for in-demand cloud skills, iii) identify issues and gaps around cloud curriculum uptake, and iv) develop solutions to meet the skill demands on core Cloud Computing topics, technical skills exercises, and modules for integration with contemporary Computer Science curricula.

Publisher's Version
Modelling Competencies for Computing Education beyond 2020: A Research Based Approach to Defining Competencies in the Computing Disciplines
Stephen Frezza, Mats Daniels, Arnold Pears, Åsa Cajander, Viggo Kann, Amanpreet Kapoor, Roger McDermott, Anne-Kathrin Peters, Mihaela Sabin, and Charles Wallace
(Gannon University, USA; Uppsala University, Sweden; KTH, Sweden; University of Florida, USA; Robert Gordon University, UK; University of New Hampshire, USA; Michigan Technological University, USA)
How might the content and outcomes of tertiary education programmes be described and analysed in order to understand how they are structured and function? To address this question we develop a framework for modelling graduate competencies linked to tertiary degree programmes in the computing disciplines. While the focus of our work is computing the framework is applicable to education more broadly.
The work presented here draws upon the pioneering curricular document for information technology (IT2017), curricular competency frameworks, other related documents such as the software engineering competency model (SWECOM), the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), current research in competency models, and elicitation workshop results from recent computing conferences.
The aim is to inform the ongoing Computing Curricula (CC2020) project, an endeavour supported by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society. We develop the Competency Learning Framework (CoLeaF), providing an internationally relevant tool for describing competencies. We argue that this competency based approach is well suited for constructing learning environments and assists degree programme architects in dealing with the challenge of developing, describing and including competencies relevant to computer and IT professionals.
In this paper we demonstrate how the CoLeaF competency framework can be applied in practice, and though a series of case studies demonstrate its effectiveness and analytical power as a tool for describing and comparing degree programmes in the international higher education landscape.

Publisher's Version
Predicting Academic Performance: A Systematic Literature Review
Arto Hellas, Petri Ihantola, Andrew Petersen, Vangel V. Ajanovski, Mirela Gutica, Timo Hynninen, Antti Knutas, Juho Leinonen, Chris Messom, and Soohyun Nam Liao
(University of Helsinki, Finland; University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada; Ss Cyril and Methodius University, Macedonia; British Columbia Institute of Technology, Canada; South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, Finland; Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland; Monash University, Australia; University of California at San Diego, USA)
The ability to predict student performance in a course or program creates opportunities to improve educational outcomes. With effective performance prediction approaches, instructors can allocate resources and instruction more accurately. Research in this area seeks to identify features that can be used to make predictions, to identify algorithms that can improve predictions, and to quantify aspects of student performance. Moreover, research in predicting student performance seeks to determine interrelated features and to identify the underlying reasons why certain features work better than others. This working group report presents a systematic literature review of work in the area of predicting student performance. Our analysis shows a clearly increasing amount of research in this area, as well as an increasing variety of techniques used. At the same time, the review uncovered a number of issues with research quality that drives a need for the community to provide more detailed reporting of methods and results and to increase efforts to validate and replicate work.

Publisher's Version
The Internet of Things in Undergraduate Computer and Information Science Education: Exploring Curricula and Pedagogy
Barry Burd, Lecia Barker, Félix Armando Fermín Pérez, Ingrid Russell, Bill Siever, Liviana Tudor, Michael McCarthy, and Ian Pollock
(Drew University, USA; University of Colorado Boulder, USA; National University of San Marcos, Peru; University of Hartford, USA; Washington University at St. Louis, USA; Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania; Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Romania; Carnegie Mellon University, USA; California State University East Bay, USA)
As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues its expansion into homes, businesses, government, and industries, the impact for computer science educators is amplified. In 2017, the ITiCSE IoT working group identified relevant content, tools for teaching, and four IoT course types. The resulting report provided an entry point for educators challenged with setting up a new IoT course, but did not consider the curricular content of a standalone specialization nor effective teaching approaches for this interdisciplinary field. In this report, the 2018 working group builds on its prior work through an updated review of literature and interviews with IoT instructors. The report addresses two research questions. First, what should a curriculum intended to produce IoT specialists include? We propose here a transdisciplinary curriculum that integrates threads from several disciplines on a single campus and we relate it to the ACM/IEEE 2013 Computing Curricula Knowledge Areas. Second, what pedagogical practices should be used to teach IoT? We found very little scholarship describing actual teaching practices, but our interviewees described their approaches and challenges in teaching. We present these as well as descriptions of several relevant teaching approaches in the report.

Publisher's Version
Propagating the Adoption of CS Educational Innovations
Cynthia Taylor, Jaime Spacco, David P. Bunde, Zack Butler, Heather Bort, Christopher Lynnly Hovey, Francesco Maiorana, and Thomas Zeume
(Oberlin College, USA; Knox College, USA; Rochester Institute of Technology, USA; Marquette University, USA; University of Colorado Boulder, USA; University of Catania, Italy; TU Dortmund, Germany)
In this report, we survey the existing scholarship in STEM higher education regarding what motivates, encourages, and inhibits educators' decisions to adopt teaching innovations. After reviewing common theoretical foundations and considerations for adoption and dissemination studies, we identify challenges for encouraging adoption among educators in higher education. When possible, we provide evidence-based recommendations from the literature on how to overcome these challenges. We then consider the relevance of scholarship from general higher education and other STEM disciplines to the context of computer science in particular, discussing similarities and areas of divergence that would affect dissemination efforts. In order to better guide change agents in propagating beneficial teaching practices, tools, and resources, we conclude by summarizing best practices for promoting the adoption of innovations in computer science higher education.

Publisher's Version

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