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In a modern society, seniors want to be a part of the digital world and the research in progress seeks to present whether through Serious Games can help their learning process and understanding of cybersecurity when online browsing, namely, deciding which actions to make when facing an eminent threat. this position paper aims to presents a new research on how Serious Games can help seniors to become more aware in the cybersecurity theme and how to be more careful when search the web. In this research the methodology apply is the Action Research, by identifying the problem –lack of knowledge that seniors have on the online threats and promoting an action –the Serious Game played to teach and motivate the senior to become safer online.

We often point to the relative increase in the amount and sophistication of evaluations of visualization systems versus the earliest days of the field as evidence that we are maturing as a field. I am not so convinced. In particular, I feel that evaluations of visualizations, as they are ordinarily performed in the field or asked for by reviewers, fail to tell us very much that is useful or transferable about visualization systems, regardless of the statistical rigor or ecological validity of the evaluation. Through a series of thought experiments, I show how our current conceptions of visualization evaluations can be incomplete, capricious, or useless for the goal of furthering the field, more in line with the “heroic age” of medical science than the rigorous evidence-based field we might aspire to be. I conclude by suggesting that our models for designing evaluations, and our priorities as a field, should be revisited.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently gained a lot of attention as a new e-learning paradigm. Despite its widespread use, the high percentage of students who do not use it raises concerns among institutions in developed countries who have spent considerable time and money developing it. As a result, it is critical to comprehend the variables that affect students' decisions to take MOOCs. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for assessing MOOC acceptance among students in Nigerian higher education institution, and it expands on the technology acceptance model (TAM). Five constructs and two moderators are identified and hypothesized and synthesis of related prior literature: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, reputation, subjective norm, facilitating condition, and technology awareness. The suggested conceptual framework in this research enriches existing literature on student’s intention to use MOOCs.

This conceptual paper argues that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and attitude are insufficient in explaining online health information seeking patterns among women. Building on the technology acceptance model, this paper presents socio-economic status/income as a direct influence on the attitude that web users have towards searching for health-related information on the internet. This newly added socio-demographic construct offers an understanding of how social factors can determine attitude towards online health information-seeking behavior. The paper conceptualizes socioeconomic status as another factor that has a direct influence attitude, thus influencing women's decision to use or not to use online health-related content. This study highlights the implications of the positive attitude of women towards online health-related content which sometimes does not translate into the actual use of online health-related information. Thus, by introducing income as a limiting or motivating factor, it helps to explain how the affordability of access to the internet might explain why women have a positive attitude towards the internet through their perceptions of its usefulness and ease of use and yet decide not to utilize it.

Academic advising of the postgraduate students is considered as a fundamental rule and one of the significant positive services and responsibilities for the academic staff follow up in most of the e-leading educations. The expert system is considered as one of most achievement areas in artificial intelligence and highly appreciated for application with e-learning and teaching methods. The aim of this paper, is to survey the most expert systems used in advisory model and replaced with the manual registration and advising system of face to face communication and discussion in Instructor office. The method used of determined the key factors related to student advising and expert system models though open access databases. The finding of this section reviews out nine selected expert systems in order to explore the strengths, and limitations of existing expert system approaches to advising undergraduate students.

The number of internet users with E-Learning models offered in high educational institutions has increased rapidly with the beginning of this century. However, with the increment in number of higher education in the universities, the learner needs more flexibility to attend lesions and easy participate in communication. Therefore, E-Learning is one of the ways provide an accessibility and flexibility to more learners to overcome the far distance of locations or different cultures or timing management for achieving student satisfaction. This paper aims to analyze the current studies on benefits of E-Learning of student satisfaction on the technologies applied and type of blended learning used in learning process to get better qualified learners and to improve the student learning outcomes. The method based on showing different types of E-Learning strategies and the way that allowed learners and faculties to communicate using the common communication models. The finding of this paper shows analytical studies results and their positive evidence with student satisfaction on E-Learning models.

Nowadays, the technology of immersive environment and multimodal interaction like the virtual reality (VR) devices provide people with a way to visualize the natural environment. These applications in the field of environmental education will contribute to the study of their positive role in solving societal issues around AI (ethical, legal, and social implications). Users can use it to create a real experience in the environment, not just the images they see. This empirical study suggests that an environmental education programs by immersive and normal environmental films can be effective in helping to improving learning performance and environmental identity. The method of analysis is quantitative analysis, combined with qualitative. The experimental group used immersive applications to view VR video clips while the control group used a desktop computer to observe the same video clips. The subjects were given the same questionnaire after video viewing. The questionnaire included environmental knowledge related to video clips and the Connectedness to Nature scale to measure participants' trait levels of feeling emotionally connected to the natural world. The results answered the research questions well and supported these hypotheses: (1) The use of VR equipment will affect the learning performance of the subjects. The learning effect of the experimental group is better than that of the control group. (2) The use of VR equipment could improve the environmental identity of the subjects. Compared with the control group, the result of scale in the experimental group showed a higher level of environmental identity.

Impulsive buying is viewed as behaviour influenced by external and internal stimuli. The impulsive buying behaviour resulted in a swift buying decision. This study describes previous studies on how impulsive buying would benefit the companies. Therefore, companies are trying to understand what would induce impulsive buying towards their products. Capturing the behaviour requires some tools such as an eye tracker. This article collects the latest impulsive buying studies. Methods and tools used are explained in the articles. The last part of the article discusses future research to be conducted on online impulsive buying.

Providing accurate attendance marking system in real-time is challenging. It is tough to mark the attendance of a student in the large classroom when there are many students attending the class. Many attendance management systems have been implemented in the recent research. However, the attendance management system based on facial recognition still has issues. Thus many research have been conducted to improve system. This paper reviewed the previous works on attendance management system based on facial recognition. This article does not only provide the literature review on the earlier work or related work, but it also provides the deep analysis of Principal Component Analysis, discussion, suggestions for future work.

This communication aims to identify factors fostering Information Technology (IT) acceptance by nurses in Morocco. It suggests a model based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of Technology [1] extended by a new construct called “Trust”. The study was conducted in public and private healthcare organizations located in Agadir city, south of Morocco. It concerned 250 nurses, representing almost 63% of the target population (400 nurses). Results showed that the suggested model explained 42.6% of total variance in the intention to accept IT by nurses. They also revealed that Trust, Performance expectancy and Facilitating conditions influenced significantly the Moroccan nurses' intention to accept to use IT. Moreover, the research work develops here a useful knowledge that could help healthcare managers and decision makers who plan to implement IT in efficient manner within their organizations.

Most learners are introduced to academic papers in their graduate work. Typically, most of us learn to read and understand these papers by reading many of them and listening to more senior colleagues and teachers describe and interpret these papers in the class or reading groups. As our experience grows we become better at this skill. There is a need to read papers in a particular research area to provide an understanding of what has been done in the area, and what questions remain unanswered. We describe a work-in-progress to help teach students to read academic papers and build a base understanding of a field under the broad framework of case studies adopted and developed by business educators. This approach requires students to prepare for a discussion on a particular case in a class, mostly, independent of the instructor. We have applied a number of these best practices from case study teaching and applied a modified approach to a sequence of papers a research area during a course. We applied our modified technique in 2015 with 10 students, and students commented on how the approach helped them, significantly, in being able to read and understand academic papers.

Although online learning is shifting the teaching paradigm at tertiary institutions, there are limited studies that assess the effectiveness of online courses, particularly in the occupational and environmental health field and among mature aged students. The main aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of online i Blackboard! units as compared to traditional i paper basedi units taught as part of the Professional Masters in Occupational and Environmental Health at the Edith Cowan University. Unit commencement and completion questionnaires were designed and distributed over two academic semesters to evaluate studentsi perceptions of the effectiveness of the modes of delivery. To obtain more detailed information, a focus group meeting was conducted. In addition lecturers were interviewed. It was found that online students and those studying both online and paper based units had significantly more lecturer- student and peer interactions than those studying solely paper based units. Furthermore it was established that in both teaching modes, students and some lecturers had challenges and that neither teaching method was regarded as being significantly better than the other. The level of student and lecturers satisfaction with online learning was high and with appropriate strategies, there is the potential for online learning to be more effective.

This publication describes the analysis and development of an application for Borderline Personality Disorder patients, which was conducted with the assistance of 18 psychological experts from three different countries and resulted in a functional prototype containing those requirements. Nonsuicidal self-injury means deliberately harming one’s own body tissue without suicidal intent and is associated with Borderline Personality Disorder. The research objective was to identify basic requirements to help those people with the support of a mobile device. Due to the lack of available mobile applications to support both patients and therapists, the novel prototype unCUT was developed and evaluated with those psychological experts throughout different iterations which ended up in 14 identified basic requirements for such an application.

Each year, VTS proudly presents the Best Paper Award to the author(s) of the most outstanding paper from those presented at the previous year's symposium. The candidates for this honor are initially selected based solely on the numerical ratings of the reviewers and symposium attendees, as recorded on the review forms and the session rating cards. The Best Paper Award Judges then carefully review the candidate papers as published in the proceedings. The judges provide numerical scores and comments for each candidate paper. The scores and comments are compiled to select the best paper.

This paper did a research on students' different forms of reading. Two groups of students were involved in this research. One is a treatment group who did screen reading and the other is a control group who did paper reading. By comparing the level of intelligent memory, structure analysis and overall grasp, we find out that there is no great difference between these two groups in structure analysis and overall grasp, but the control group did much better in intelligent memory, especially the intelligent memory of details.

The purpose of this study was to compare data collected via online surveys to via paper-and-pencil ones in mental health fields. Two groups of participants completed the Adult Adaptation Inventory (AAI) and Self-rating depression scale (SDS) either in online format or in paper-and-pencil format independently. Data collected via paper-and-pencil surveys had more missing data than Internet-based ones. As for internal consistency, there were no significant differences in AAI between both two groups, while internal consistency of SDS in the online format was much higher than in the paper-and-pencil format. There was measurement invariance of both two scales across the two conditions. Finally, there were no significant differences in mean scores of both two scales between both two formats. The basic similarity of the properties across the two conditions suggests the viability of the Internet-based surveys for assessing mental health status of adults.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to study changes in cerebral blood oxygenation during a verbal memory task. Six right-handed male and four female volunteers matched on demographic variables and verbal memory performance participated in the study. Prior to verbal memory tasks, four verbal fluency tasks were loaded in order to obtain information of standard cerebral blood oxygenation for each subject. Effect of rock-paper-scissors exercise as easy finger action on cerebral blood flow was examined during the verbal memory tasks. Significant responses were observed in the left prefrontal cortex, the insula bilaterally, the midline supplementary motor area, and the medial parietal cortex.

In cognitive science and philosophy, the conception of cognition has evolved rapidly in recent years. It is no longer strictly a process that happens inside the head, intervening between perception and action. Instead, cognition is considered something that subsumes both perception and action, engages the body, and even incorporates the response of objects in the environment to actions taken upon them. One speaks of cognition being embodied and extended. Cognitive processes such as problem solving might actually involve the coupled dynamics of the body and the environment, where the finding of problem solutions involves interactively driving the coupled dynamics toward behaviors that satisfy the task goals of an individual. Researchers in haptics have long been working with the notions of dynamical coupling between the body and environment, with interwoven definitions of perception and action, and with flexible conceptions of the proximal and distal and the physical and virtual. It is perhaps striking to suppose that the activity during which our users wield our interface devices might be considered cognition itself. We suggest in this paper that the field of haptics is uniquely positioned to draw upon and to contribute to active debates in cognitive science, and that a new interpretation of “interface” can be useful in launching such an endeavor.

The Internet and World Wide Web are increasingly being used for survey distribution and administration in both academic and practitioner research. Little systematic research exists on the efficacy of these survey administration media or their potential psychometric effects. This paper reports on a study of the potential biasing effects of online versus paper surveys. We consider issues specifically related to the information systems research context and introduce psychometric issues of general interest to those considering testing for response stability between online and paper survey administration. The study provides an assessment of the psychometric differences between paper-and-pencil and online survey administration for the well-known technology acceptance model (TAM) instrument. The results indicate that biasing effects can occur which significantly reduce the stability of an instrument across administration methods. We sound a cautionary note on the practice of placing any existing paper-and-pencil survey instrument on the Web without consideration of the biasing effects of Web-based survey administration.

This study builds on the theory of planned behavior, institutional and diffusion theories to investigate physicians? attitudes and usage behaviors of electronic medical records (EMR). Interviews with seventeen physician-residents enrolled in a Family Practice residency program and eight attending physicians in the same clinic showed that most physicians held rather negative attitudes regarding the EMR system. EMR was often times seen as an intrusion in the patient-physician interaction. Other findings relate to the impacts EMR had on physicians? time, expertise, physicians? learning, the length (and sometimes the accuracy) of the clinical notes. Challenges associated with behavioral control issues such as availability of computers and the physical positioning of computers are shown to be very important in the context of this case. Physician-residents have to use EMR because of its mandatory nature, however, if they had a choice or the power, the majority of physicians would use the paper chart.

For decades, school attendance has an important role in determining student success and ensuring that students regularly come to classes. Traditionally, a sheet of paper and a pencil or pen is used to document school attendance at universities. In most cases, the professor would hand out a piece of paper to a student. This student would mark their presence on the paper sheet and pass it to the person sitting next to them. The piece of paper would then travel throughout the classroom until the final student received the paper. Finally, the piece of paper would be given back to the professor or the teacher's assistant, so they may take note of which student is present and which student is absent. In the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, this method of taking attendance poses a great risk to possible disease transmission. Everyone within the room would be touching the same piece of paper, and sometimes students may even share the same pen or pencil with their classmates. Everyone in the classroom, including the professor, would be at risk if one student were infected with the COVID-19 virus. This is attributed to the attendance method. This paper proposes a zero-effort, zero-interaction attendance method based on two aspects that are currently present in a typical classroom: access points and a student's Wi-Fi enabled devices (e.g., smartphones). Our research found this method to be a no-hassle attendance-taking method that pinpoints where a student is within the classroom, without the class suffering from any disruption in learning.

This paper aims to discuss two main factors that can lead infants to suffer from autism. These two factors are abnormal genetic expressions in babies’ central nervous system and environmental risks around them. The main content of this paper based on some cutting-edge researches made by scientists all over the world in recent years. By comparing and contrasting these experimental results, this paper will analyze the differences and similarities between them and find two possible ways to treat autism. These two ways can make contributions to the rehabilitation of autism or alleviate the autistic behaviors of the patients.

This research full paper explores the magnitude of added course fees and miscellaneous costs in an engineering program and how these fees impact lower socio-economic students. Previous work has examined the effects of added course fees and development boards on students from various socioeconomic backgrounds. While the study found that students of varying socioeconomic status did not agree that they felt "ostracized" as a result of added course expenses, the study did not examine whether students felt other, less severe feelings of exclusion or loss of identity in relation to engineering costs.This paper provides an in-depth exploration of the effects of added course expenses on students’ sense of inclusion in Electrical and Computer Engineering Programs. Specific emphasis is placed on how student experience varies by socio-economic status, and the experience of low-socio-economic status is treated with particular interest. "Added course expenses" includes any development boards, parts, and personal computing resources (laptops) necessary for student success but not directly charged by the school for enrollment in a course.

Work-based learning is a teaching and learning method which requires students to go through practical training. In work-based learning, also employers are responsible for teaching as well as evaluation of the students. Students learn theory at the university and apply these academic and technical skills at their working place.This full paper aims to provide a literature review on how work-based learning is organised and implemented in engineering curricula. It also aims to find out the possible factors which are influential in work-based learning and to get information on how to provide work-based learning more effectively. We followed the guidelines for systematic literature reviews by Kitchenham and Charters [1] and asked the following research questions: RQ1: What are the problems faced by faculty and universities in conducting work-based learning? RQ2: What is the student motivation to join work-based learning programmes? RQ3: How the companies are involved and how the universities are organising the training of the company's work-based mentors? RQ4: What is the main model of work-based learning in universities? RQ5: What are the benefits (real or perceived) of work-based learning?According to the selection criteria, 42 papers on work-based learning in engineering curricula published from 2008 to 2018, were selected for the final review and conclusions.

In this research category full paper, we present our findings on the effects of different course policies for seconxd-chance testing on students’ studying and exam taking behavior. Second-chance testing, where students are allowed to take a second instance of an exam for some form of grade replacement, is a less expensive approximation of mastery-based learning that can be easily integrated into a broad range of college course structures. It encourages students to review course material after poor performance on an examination but limits the amount of resources instructors must invest in the creation of examinations or in grading them. There exists, however, a large space of potential course policies for integrating second-chance testing into a course and little prior research on how these policies affect student behavior.This paper analyzes three different grading policies in use at Midwestern University. All of the policies attempt to encourage students to prepare adequately for the first-chance exam and review the material again before the second-chance exam, if they elect to take it. The first policy used a partial grade replacement policy with insurance: students’ grades could only improve by taking the second-chance exam but the first-chance exam always counts for at least one-third of a students’ grade on the examination. The second policy is identical, but required students to complete a zero-credit, online-homework assignment before being allowed to take the second-chance exam. The third policy implemented full grade replacement (even if the second score is lower) and capped the score that could be achieved on the second exam. By comparing these different course policies, we show that grading policies have a significant effect on whether students take second-chance exams.We also performed a quasi-experimental study, adding second-chance exams to a course. We present data from students’ exam performance and from the course’s learning management system that suggest that adding a second-chance exam had no effect on student performance or study habits for the first-chance exam. However, the total amount of time that students studied did increase substantially as students who took the second-chance exam studied an additional 60% of their original effort.

The Research to Practice Full Paper presented here describes senioritis from the student’s perspective. Senioritis is a known ailment that affects the best of students, often rendering them unproductive, depressed, and despondent. Nearly all have experienced this affliction to one extent or another, sometimes as it relates to academia and other times as it relates to particular situations or experiences in which one is involved.The instructor and grader of a required course, most often taken by senior students towards the end of their studies, noticed serious issues in students possibly experiencing this ailment and wondered what the group of students were reacting to. When asked, the students were vague, and not particularly engaged in providing an answer. The instructor asked if the students would be willing to provide a quick write up explaining what they were experiencing, and how they were reacting to it. The answer was affirmative, with the students expressing an interest in learning what other students were experiencing as well. Most students indicated that they felt they were the only one having motivation issues, as students, in general, do not talk about it. Although they did indicate some of their close friends had similar issues. The student’s experiences were formulated via an in-class reflective assignment, where students were asked to keep the response to one page or less and asked the following question below:“Tell me how senioritis affected you this semester. How did you approach things difrerently and how did you feel about school in general?”The results from this were not surprising, but significant in the reasons they cited for their issues. Students expressed gratitude for the opportunity to think about what was going on and this compelled them to work through some of the issues they encountered. The instructor and grader found that after this activity some of the students were able to work more effectively and responded more positively as their time in the classroom was coming to a close. This paper will present the results of this informal, in-class study examined using content analysis techniques intended to probe the reflective assignment responses for themes and issues students encounter at this time in their academic career. This work intends to impart information to faculty and graduate staff that will provide a clear up-to-date understanding of what students are experiencing in the classroom

This Innovate Practice Full Paper document presents a technological ecosystem for classroom management that we call GSA. GSA is meant to be used in any class/ of any subject/k-college and supports electronically mediated in class, engaging activities learning strategies to reduce dropout rates and create more learning opportunities. In the previous study, we interviewed 123 8th and 9th-grade students and 15 teachers who had been using the GSA for two weeks. The results were promising. An increase in the level of motivation was observed. Being able to mediate in real time, teacher/student interactions create opportunities to capture valuable data that can be used to feed performance/dropout predictors. In this paper, we discuss the introduction of these predictors and how they can be used to foster preemptive measures to mitigate the problem.

This research to practice full paper reviews and implements evidence-based strategies to develop and institute the Pitt STRIVE annual mentor-mentee retreat at the University of Pittsburgh. While many institutions have successfully increased underrepresented scholar enrollment in doctoral engineering programs, evidence suggests that successful completion of degrees is not only dependent on student aptitude, but also an established community, immersion, and a sense of belonging within the institution.The overarching goal of the retreat is to have a sustained long-term, positive impact on mentor-mentee relationships. Thus, we chose to design an annual mentor-mentee retreat, to meet the following objectives: 1) encourage and promote cultural awareness among faculty and graduate students, 2) to humanize perceptions of faculty and graduate students to one another, 3) to create a community founded upon the desired success of underrepresented graduate students, and 4) to encourage deeper relationships among faculty and their graduate students, as well as other underrepresented graduate students, to promote academic growth and success. Given that our retreat was constructed based on developing an understanding of the University of Pittsburgh’s current climate, as well as evidenced practices, we hypothesized that measurable changes could be assessed, and serve as encouragement for other institutions with similar goals.Through field notes, analyzing the structures and agendas of the retreats, post-retreat feedback surveys, as well as reflective interviews with veteran mentors and mentees, we link assessment data to various structures of the retreat and offer a model for other graduate programs to adopt. We aim to inform other STEM graduate programs on how to adapt the retreat to improve faculty engagement and academic climate change to ensure underrepresented doctoral student success.

This Research Category – Full Paper presents initial emergent themes from our quest to understand the construct of intuition. Our work uses theories of expertise development and dual-cognitive processing frameworks to provide a theoretical grounding to define discipline-specific intuition. We hypothesize that intuition can be observed in disciplinary experts through discussions of experience and decision-making processes. Interviews were conducted with professionals in three fields – engineering, nursing, and business management – that engage intuition in decision-making. A comparative analysis of emergent themes is presented to understand similarities and differences in use and definition across these disciplines. Parallel grounded theory and critical incident technique approaches were used to identify perceptions and incidents of intuition. Results suggest that intuition can be defined as a "sense of knowing" that is context specific and at least partly attributable to experience. Inclusion of multiple fields and comparisons across disciplines form the foundation for our future work focusing solely on engineering intuition.

In this Research-to-Practice Full Paper, we present the results of adopting Team-Based Learning (TBL) for teaching a Sophomore-level Systems Programming course. The goal of TBL is to "provide opportunities for students to apply their knowledge in the classroom to solve problems rather than just covering content." Based on the performance of the students in the course taught with TBL, we found that TBL had a statistically significant impact on student performance in 2 of the 5 programming assignments. Additionally, the end-of-semester student survey indicated that 88% of the students said that the team-based learning activities helped them understand the material better. Students mentioned that they felt like they belonged in Computer Science (fostering a sense of community in large classrooms) and frequently studied with some of their team members for the course assignments. Compared to a previous offering of the course that was purely lecture-based, the class as a whole received higher final grades and performed better on all of the programming assignments.

The effect of Virtual Reality (VR)-based lectures on student motivation to learn complex 3D materials science concepts is discussed in this Research Full Paper. With the growing classroom size and less personalized attention to students, STEM instructors are challenged with finding ways to strengthen student motivation and sustainably transform the educational experience of current and future learners. Students' ability to visualize and imagine complex 3D concepts in multiple engineering disciplines can be a barrier to learning for diverse learners. This research uses VR technology to study the impact on student motivation to learn materials science concepts based on John Keller's ARCS model of motivation. As a benchmark, student participants (n=26) were given a slides-based lecture, and the initial motivation level was assessed using the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) and reflection questions. Next, the VR intervention was given using low-cost and scalable Cardboard Viewers fitted with personal smartphones, followed by IMMS survey and reflection questions. A mixed-methods approach including the use of a t-test to analyze quantitative data, and Chi’s (1997) verbal data analysis to identify emergent themes among qualitative data was applied in this study. Overall student participants’ motivation was found to increase due to VR intervention. Among the four components of the ARCS motivation model of instruction, attention and satisfaction components showed a significant increase after the VR intervention, while relevance and confidence components remained unchanged. This finding suggests the use of scalable VR technology as a suitable option for capturing students’ attention in order to facilitate learning about complex 3D concepts in engineering classrooms.

Modern learning approaches consider attaining self-regulation (Self-Regulated Learning). Clever curriculum design can foster maximum learning effect for the students. An example is Peer Instruction, especially the ConcepTest and Peer Discussion phases therein. IT can support such approaches with modern Web-based solutions such as Audience Response Systems. In this position paper we discuss utilisation of Audience Response Systems during the different phases of Peer Instruction to foster Self-Regulated Learning.

This Research Full Paper will discuss the demonstration of critical thinking of undergraduate students through their required co-op experiences. Critical thinking is an important 21st century skill that is expressed through measurable outcomes such as the ability to successfully use information, design, analyze, and problem solve. At Rochester Institute of Technology, a primarily technically focused university with strong programs in engineering and computing sciences, there is a dedicated effort to enhance the critical thinking ability of the students on campus. This paper will discuss our initiative for the integration of critical thinking into the student experience. In addition, the majority of our students complete one or more paid cooperative education experiences to satisfy their degree requirements. Upon completion of the experience, the employers are asked to rate the student performance on several metrics, one of which is demonstration of critical thinking. By analyzing the data from these surveys, we have found that employers consistently rate our students as proficient and capable. Our analysis shows that there is a slight difference in critical thinking ratings based on field of study, but not based on term in which it occurred, or number of experiences students engaged in.

When prompted to imagine the story of today’s top engineering graduate, one might imagine a successful leader and innovator in this ‘research to practice’ full paper. Changes in the emotional responses of today’s college students pose an intriguing question: can generational differences in emotion suggest a shift in entrepreneurial mind-set and leadership choices post-engineering education? This paper uses modified original protocol developed by Horner (1972) on gendered generalizations of professional success and Engle’s (2003) updated approach for considering responses about occupational choice. The researchers also included an emotion scale (PANAS, 1988, 2007) to conduct an examination of 83 college students’ responses to a “storytelling cue” prompt about a time when a new engineering graduate stepped away from their CEO role within their founded company. Measures in two parts are reported. Stories written by the participants are coded for the presence or absence of specific motives, e.g. achievement, power, innovation. Factors of mood are coded as negative affect and positive affect. This study had two between-subject’s factors (gender of participant - female, male - and gender of engineer in the cue prompt - female, male) which yielded four conditions: females-female prompt, males-male prompt, females-male prompt, and males-female prompt. Six univariate ANOVAS, each two by two, crossed two independent variables (gender of the participant and cue prompt gender) to produce four experimental conditions. Results revealed negative affect vs. positive affect responses to the cue. The females in the story received more negative responses by men, and the men coded more negative overall. Data from the preliminary experiment offers stunning stories by college students with compelling motivational and emotional characterizations. Some implications of gender on the costs of being innovative in engineering are discussed.

This research full paper presents a mixed methods study in developing the professional skills of engineering postdoctoral scholars and graduate students.}{It has been well documented that mentorship ability is crucial for mentee-mentor pairs in educational settings. The ability to be a mentor is a valuable professional skill for postdoctoral scholars and graduate students regardless of the career path taken following their education. How postdoctoral scholars and graduate students themselves develop an ability to mentor has not been widely researched. National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers (ERC) provide summer mentoring opportunities, including Research Experiences for Undergraduate Students (REU), Research Experiences for Teachers (RET), and Young Scholars Program (YSP), for postdoctoral scholars and graduate students to learn and practice how to be a mentor. A major challenge associated with this opportunity is the belief that such activities are not a valuable time investment. This belief can come from both the postdoctoral scholar or graduate students and their advisors. This paper presented a mixed methods study to investigate how practicing mentorship impacts the development of various professional skills for those involved in ERC Summer Programs.

This Research Category Full Paper presents an analysis of online student reviews to improve college experience. Recent studies continue to establish the efficacy of student-centered teaching strategies in increasing student satisfaction. However, with higher education programs in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields rapidly expanding in size, it is becoming increasingly more difficult not only to implement such strategies but even to identify their presence or absence. This dilemma is prevalent at the University of Central Florida, with several of its STEM programs containing more than 10,000 students. By making use of sentiment analysis and traditional statistics, we can minimize the human oversight needed to thoroughly dissect qualitative data and create a viable approach with which to tackle this issue. In this paper, we analyze massive amounts of open-ended student reviews from multiple online university review sites to gain insights on which needs students feel essential and which they feel are not being met. Through this analysis, we identify how to most efficiently realize learner-centered principles within a large institution, concurrently providing suggestions on how the university can supply their students the best possible education while also maximizing the graduation and retention rates of its STEM programs.

(Full paper, Research category) The stakeholders in the computer science education have been trying to pinpoint the most relevant factors and variables contributing significantly to student recruitment, success, and retention in computing degrees over the last several decades. The goal of these efforts is to intervene using these controllable variables as early as possible and at key transition junctions for the most benefit to the students. Yet, there is still not a general agreement, let alone a consensus, neither on the most important factors nor on the degree of their contributions. While we cannot provide a panacea to this elusive and challenging problem, in this paper, we report our initial study, analyses, and results of what we intend to transform into a longitudinal undertaking to delineate success factors in computing programs in general, and in CS2 (data structures) courses in particular. Our analyses confirm some of the findings from the literature, such as CS1 performance as the most important contributor for CS2 success as well as prior programming experience, and perception of computing. At the same time we diverge from some of the literature on such factors as high school GPA or CSO performance. Our conclusions corroborate one of the rare consensus in the computing education literature that more efforts should still be exerted in this important topic. We also provide a new and novel taxonomy of the factors for success in computing programs as well as a short summary of the ACM Guidelines over time.

This Research Full Paper presents the qualitative findings from a study that implemented digital badges in a university-level programming course. Motivation has been shown to play a key role in programming performance. Increasingly, gamification is being used to facilitate student learning of concepts and skills in programming. Our study examined the impact of digital badges on the intrinsic motivation levels of introductory programmers and the badge design features leading to motivational effects. We collected data over two academic sessions in 2015 using a badge system design implemented in the Moodle learning management platform. This paper focuses on the qualitative findings from three focus group sessions and personal interviews which explored student understanding of their badge experiences. Focus group results indicated that badges were positively received and motivating. Student recommendations included physical badges to highlight achievements, and competitive badges for added motivation. The results suggest that students’ social interactions play a role in how badges are perceived. This study should be of interest to badge designers and educational stakeholders using or contemplating badge systems. In particular, it may be of significance to stakeholders involved in computing education as it seeks to contribute to ongoing research efforts in the introductory programming domain.

This research category full paper examines the attitudes and beliefs that first-year engineering students have about the stereotypes of engineers and what it means to fit in engineering. We explored the attitudes and beliefs of 12 first-year engineering students, who may or may not identify with certain aspects of the stereotypical engineer, to understand their initial perceptions of engineering and what it means to fit in engineering. Most of the students’ descriptions of an engineer aligned with the widely-accepted stereotype of an engineer, but they were also careful to state that that image was not true of all engineers. Several students expressed how they fit in engineering as a matter of “sticking it out” because engineering requires hard work, motivation, and commitment, along with other attributes that were not descriptive of a stereotypical engineer. In this paper, we explore the tensions in how students describe the role of “an engineer” generally and their own identities and fit as engineers.

Activity sequencing is one of the deficits that autism children encounter. One of the essential skills that involve activity sequencing is toilet training which is difficult, cumbersome and sometimes never achieved for autistic children. This paper presents the requirement elicitation of Toilet Training Sequencing (TTS) wearable watch to provide customized support for autism children in toilet training. The presented prototype will help autistic children to dispense the paper based activity sequencing and thus increase the adaptation of the child with any place. The requirement elicitation techniques were conducted in collaboration with non-profit specialized centers in serving children with autism in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia "Mother of Faisal Autism Center (MFAC)". The results of the semi-structured interview, field observation and focus group are provided. The TTS prototype is demonstrated to show its applicability and effectiveness, it also includes the use of visual supports to diminish effort and time.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper focuses on the development of the entrepreneurial mindset in junior-level engineering students by combining experiential design project learning with a real-life story on entrepreneurial capacity development. The entrepreneurial mindset has been defined as a specific state of mind which orientates human conduct towards entrepreneurial activities and outcomes. The development of entrepreneurial mindset is particularly important in bridging education to the future in which individuals must be sensitive to and be able to identify and respond appropriately to the constant changes and associated opportunities that characterize the future. While different approaches are being employed to inculcate and develop this mindset in engineering students, the heavy technical course load as well as the technically-oriented mindset that many engineering students have, pose great challenges to entrepreneurial mindset development.In order to overcome these challenges, an innovative approach in which teams of interdisciplinary engineering students participate in two semesters design courses that combine engineering design with the entrepreneurial mindset has been implemented. In the first semester, the focus was on the customer discovery process to identify and evaluate opportunities, and engineering design. In the second semester, the course combines engineering design with an entrepreneurial story component. In 14 out of the 16 weeks course period in the second semester, students were required to read a short chapter every week outside class from the book: Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing by Robert Kiyosaki. Unlike most books used in schools, the book uses a real-life story to teach important entrepreneurial concepts. The chapters are easy to read and are based on the true story of how Rich Dad taught Robert Kiyosaki how to develop the entrepreneurial mindset and capacity. The students were required to answer a short quiz every week after reading each chapter. They were also required to reflect on and document in their journals the lessons learned and how to apply it to themselves. The goal is that the students can better relate to the character and the context of the story thereby facilitating the learning of important entrepreneurial concepts. The development of the entrepreneurial mindset of the students will be assessed through reflection analysis. The study will provide insights into the change in the students’ entrepreneurial mindset as a result of combining design with story-based learning in the second semester as against the first semester where design and customer discovery process was employed. The findings from this preliminary study may provide an efficient and effective strategy for developing the entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students.

This Research-to-Practice Full Paper evaluates an online programming course for K-12 educators that aimed to teach Computational Thinking (CT). CT is widely defined as a set of skills, such as problem solving and systems design, that rely on Computer Science principles. As these skills are increasingly demanded in modern society, it is critical to include CT in K-12 education to boost not only computing courses, but various other disciplines. However, most educators do not yet know the basics of CT and Computer Science fundamentals, particularly in Brazil. In this context, we designed and implemented an online programming course for K-12 educators to provide qualification in CT and Programming basics, as well as to assess learners’ attitudes towards Computing, how their motivation are expressed during the course, and the correlation between motivation and attitudes. The results indicate that participants’ attitudes towards Computing has become more positive after the course, primarily their comprehension of CT and confidence to learn Computer Science. The outcomes also suggest a high level of learners’ motivation over the course, and reveal a high correlation between the relevance expressed in the course with their interest and confidence towards Computing.

This Research-To-Practice Category Full Paper is a qualitative study of four students’ reflections on their performance and feedback on assignments in a required first-year engineering course. The intention was to gain a deep understanding of how students engage with a course’s standards-based grading (SBG) system to plan and act via an analysis of their structured reflections. The individual student cases are presented. A cross-case analysis focused on self-ratings compared to performance, actions and connections made to learning objectives, plans and connections made to learning objectives, and other insights is also presented. Implications for the design of SBG systems and accompanying reflections are discussed.

This Research-to-Practice Full Paper expands upon prior work to improve the engagement of engineering students with peer writing tutors and improve tutor feedback on engineering students’ technical reports. Before meeting with the engineering students, tutors received focused training from both the engineering course instructor and the writing tutor supervisor. In the prior research, all students completed the same assignment and met with writing tutors with their individual lab reports. In this iteration, the research was expanded to group lab reports in a multi-semester capstone course sequence, where the uniqueness of each project introduces additional dynamics. Strategies such as student elevator speeches and an additional tutor training session are employed to help improve the engagement during the tutoring session. Selected quantitative and qualitative results indicate an improved level of student-tutor engagement.

This Research to Practice Full Paper analyzes the impact of using a problem-based learning (PBL) approach on student motivation and engagement in an introductory programming course (CS1). Learning programming is a difficult task, and CS1 courses have experienced high dropout and failure rates. Some authors associate this to students’ lack of motivation and recommend the use of active learning methods to stimulate their motivation and engagement. Educators have been interested in using the PBL approach, an active instructional method based on problem solving, for its motivational potential. In this context, we surveyed students with the ARCS IMMS and UWES-S questionnaires to respectively measure their levels of motivation and engagement in a CS1 course. Results show that, on the categories of motivation, the PBL approach relates to students’ attention and relevance. It also relates to confidence and satisfaction, either positively or negatively, depending on course planning. The approach, on the other hand, does not have much relation with the categories of engagement. Finally, we also found that there must be careful problem design and planning in order to positively relate to student motivation and engagement.

According to the White Paper on Tourism for 2017, approximately 17 million Japanese travel abroad, and 24 million foreigners come to Japan for sightseeing in 2016. It can be said that it is just the time of sightseeing right now. Therefore, the knowledge of tourism has become more and more important, and the necessity for using English, which can be said to be a world common language, has been increased. As a measurement of English communication competence needed on the tourism site, the "Tourism English Proficiency Test" started in 1989. In this study, English sentences of the "Tourism English Proficiency Test" were examined, compared with English textbooks for junior high and high school students in terms of metrical linguistics. In short, frequency characteristics of character-and word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary was calculated to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material.

The research reported in this paper examines the use of mobile learning technologies for supporting primary school teaching. Data was collected by questionnaires through an online survey in urban areas and a paper based survey in rural areas of Thailand. 398 educators and school executives participated in the research. The results of the research revealed that whilst most of the educators and school executives preferred using mobile technologies, guidance and training are necessary for teacher training in the use of such technologies. It became apparent that educators need a framework before using mobile learning technologies in order for it to be effectively utilised. The research analysed the current methods for the use of mobile technologies for supporting teaching and making learning activities enjoyable for the pupils.

In this work, which is intended to be a Full Paper in the Innovative Practice Category, the implementation of an improved placement exam that increased the pass rate in a junior level systems course in the author’s electrical engineering department by 15% is presented. For almost 30 years the author’s EE department has used a face to face exam to place students in a junior level circuits and systems course or into a review workshop. The details of the exam and suggestions about future use in conjunction MyOpenMath analytics to increase student success are also given.

This Full Paper presents the results of qualitative analysis of students’ perceptions of the best and worst aspects of 87 courses related to design such as engineering design, product design, biomedical engineering innovation and design, and Mechanics-Based Design. The total enrollment in the courses was 5591 students at a Research-Intensive University in the US. Iterative close readings of the comments and open and axial coding were applied to the comments to generate codes that represent students’ comments. Codes were grouped in categories that represent students’ opinions about teaching. Students reported the best and worst aspects of design courses related to the following categories: course planning and logistics, teaching strategies, learning experiences, assessment and evaluation, mentoring and modeling, and encouragement and motivation. This work suggests that careful design of all aspects of teaching is important. Special attention should be given to aspects of design courses such as project-based learning, teamwork, and hands-on applied learning.

This Research Full Paper presents a review of the literature related to novices’ interest in learning to code. Students’ interest in this topic has been mentioned in the Computer Science Education (CSE) field since the 1990s. Although it got the attention of computing faculty and shaped a wide number of proposals, students’ disinterest remains a complex struggle in Computer Science (CS) courses. On the other hand, we still have little knowledge about what theoretical concepts and methods of research are adopted by researchers who study interest, particularly among novices in programming. As an attempt to close this gap, we carried out a systematic review process to identify frequent assumptions and methodological decisions aiming to establish a sense of what happened in the last seventeen years in this research field. Based on our review, the findings revealed that although a high number of contributions is propagated, most of them are based on lesson learned reports that fail in producing reliable evidences to substantiate the effectiveness of some proposals. The analysis of the 36 publications considered relevant to our systematic review revealed that there is not a convergent understanding between CSE researchers of what is interest and how to measure. Not many of them study interest based on specific theories or observe how students’ interest changes over time. So, although we have found many publications referring to practical and experimental applications, we could see that this research area is still fragmented and led by a bit of uncertainty about what really can sustain novices more interested in learning coding.