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Lewis Receives Best Research Paper Award at ICER Conference

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Colleen Lewis received the Chair鈥檚 Award at the International Computing Education Research Conference (ICER) last month in New Zealand.

The award recognizes the best research paper presented at the conference.

Lewis received the award for her paper, 鈥淭racking Program State: A Key Challenge in Learning to Program,鈥� which shares the case study of a middle-school student鈥檚 experience debugging a computer program he had written.

鈥淭he take-away from the paper is that we should help students recognize what they should be paying attention to within the programming environment. A particularly important thing to pay attention to is the state鈥攁ll the variables that are relevant to how the computer program runs,鈥� Lewis said. 鈥淚 was pleased during the presentation that the attendees took seriously what we could learn from analyzing a single student鈥檚 experience. This reaction was surprising and encouraging.鈥�

Lewis conducted her research in 2009 while pursuing graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She collected her data during a summer enrichment program that taught computer science to students entering the 6th grade. With parental and student consent, she recorded the students鈥� work and conversations that took place within the programming environment.

鈥淭his type of qualitative, close analysis of individual students engaged in authentic behavior is rare within computer science education,鈥� she said.

Lewis joined the 无忧视频 faculty this fall. She earned her bachelor鈥檚 degree (electrical engineering and computer science, 2005), her master鈥檚 degree (computer science, 2009) and her doctorate (science and mathematics education, 2012) from UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on computer science education.