This grant funds participant costs for the 2010 Software Engineering Educators' Symposium (SEES), where participants will learn about latest pedagogy in Software Engineering education and teaching techniques that appeal to diverse learners. Participants will be also attend the 2010 SIGSOFT Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-18), where they will network with researchers in Software Engineering. Leaders in the field have volunteered their time to organize and run the event. The goal of this proposal is to help reverse the decline in the percentages of minority and women students choosing to study computer science at American colleges and universities. To achieve this goal, the grant will emphasize participation from colleges and universities with large minority and/or female student enrollments.
The purpose of the group travel grant was to help to increase participation in software engineering by building relationships with computer science faculty members at schools with populations of students that represent underrepresented groups. Preference for travel awards was therefore given to those applicants who taught at institutions whose student population was majority African American, Hispanic, Native American and women. This project supported travel grant awards for twenty-two faculty members from post-secondary institutions in the United States to enable them to attend the 2010 Software Engineering Educators’ Symposium (SEES), which was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. SEES is designed to improve the recruitment, education, and retention of students in software engineering. The symposium consisted of two half-day tutorials with two sessions per tutorial on alternative techniques for teaching software engineering and programming. SEES 2010 consisted of the following four sessions: CS0 Programming Course using Scratch, Teaching Software Design from a General Design Perspective, Making Software Testing Engaging and Affordable in Early Programming Classes and a Panel: Innovative Approaches to CS1/CS2 Sequence. Participants were provided access to instructional materials, received practical tips on how to successfully apply new techniques and were shown new tools that support hands-on instruction and active learning. The travel awards were used to help defray costs to attend SEES 2010 and the 18th International Symposium of Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE). Each award covered travel, hotel accommodations and registration to SEES. For some of the awardees, it also covered some of the registration cost to FSE. Twenty-one awardees submitted evaluation forms that rated the sessions as well as the overall organization of the symposium. All sessions were deemed relevant by the awardees based on a Likert scale (Excellent-4, Good–3, Acceptable-2,Poor-1) that was used to assess the sessions in four categories (organization, method of presentation, clarity of session objective, opportunity for discussion, and value of information). Average ratings for all categories for all sessions were above 3.2. The overall quality of the symposium, scheduling of tutorials, organization of tutorial sessions and opportunity to interact with faciltators were all rated at 3.5 or above. A majority of the awardees felt that the sessions provided practical information that could be used in their classes. Furthermore, through their attendance to SEES and FSE, awardees were able to network with software engineering researchers.
