Intelligent Support for Computer Science Education

Intelligent Support for Computer Science Education presents the authors’ research journey into the effectiveness of human tutoring, with the goal of developing educational technology that can be used to improve introductory Computer Science education at the undergraduate level. Nowadays, Computer Science education is central to the concerns of society, as attested by the penetration of information technology in all aspects of our lives; consequently, in the last few years interest in Computer Science at all levels of schooling, especially at the college level, has been flourishing. However, introductory concepts in Computer Science such as data structures and recursion are difficult for novices to grasp.

Key Features:

• Includes a comprehensive and succinct overview of the Computer Science education landscape at all levels of education.
• Provides in-depth analysis of one-on-one human tutoring dialogues in introductory Computer Science at college level.
• Describes a scalable, plug-in based Intelligent Tutoring System architecture, portable to different topics and pedagogical strategies.
• Presents systematic, controlled evaluation of different versions of the system in ecologically valid settings (18 actual classes and their laboratory sessions).
• Provides a time-series analysis of student behavior when interacting with the system.

This book will be of special interest to the Computer Science education community, specifically instructors of introductory courses at the college level, and Advanced Placement (AP) courses at the high school level. Additionally, all the authors’ work is relevant to the Educational Technology community, especially to those working in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, their interfaces, and Educational Data Mining, in particular as applied to human-human pedagogical interactions and to user interaction with educational software.

Barbara Di Eugenio is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Chicago, IL, USA. There she leads the NLP laboratory (https://nlp.lab.uic.edu). Dr. Di Eugenio holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1993); she joined UIC in 1999. Her interests focus on the theory and practice of Natural Language Processing, with applications to educational technology, health care, human robot interaction, and social media. Dr. Di Eugenio is an NSF CAREER awardee (2002), and a UIC University Scholar (2018-21). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Insti- tute of Health, the Office of Naval Research, Motorola, Yahoo!, Politecnico di Torino, and the Qatar Research Foundation. She has graduated 12 PhD students and 30 Master's students, and published more than one hundred refereed publications.

Davide Fossati is currently a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, USA. Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2016, Dr. Fossati held positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2009-2010) and Carnegie Mellon University (2010-2015). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009. He also holds an M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the Po-
litecnico di Milano, Italy (2004), and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2003). Dr. Fossati's primary scholarly focus is Technology Enhanced Learning, with particular interest in the development of Artificial Intelligence systems to support Computer Science education.

Nick Green is a technology professional with 20 years of research and development experience in academia and industry. Dr. Green received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2017, where he focused on educational technology, natural language processing, and software engineering. Outside of academia, he has worked for companies such as Sony Interactive Entertainment and Facebook. He has a passion for the startup scene where he is also a serial entrepreneur having founded companies in fields such as security and precision agriculture.