Category: CS Education

Former INIT Lab PhD student Jeremiah Blanchard is continuing to wrap up publication of his final dissertation-related studies and data analysis. We are proud to announce that he has recently had a paper accepted to the upcoming ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium! His final study focused on investigating the […]

Today, the INIT Lab is proud to announce that PhD student Jeremiah Blanchard defended his dissertation work “Building Bridges: Dual-Modality Instruction and Introductory Programming Coursework” this afternoon! We held the defense virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions. Jeremiah’s committee members were myself (chair), Dr. Christina Gardner-McCune (co-chair), Dr. Joseph Wilson, Dr. Kristy Boyer, Dr. […]

INIT Lab PhD student (and full-time UF CISE lecturer) Jeremiah Blanchard‘s latest paper on hybrid blocks- and text-based programming environments for introductory computing classes at the college level has been accepted to the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium 2020. Not only has it been accepted, but it has received […]

INIT Lab PhD student Jeremiah Blanchard recently attended the VL/HCC 2019 conference in Memphis, TN, to present his paper: “Effects of Code Representation on Student Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Programming,” which was announced in a previous blog post here. At the conference, he received an “Honorable Mention” award, which represents his hard work and the […]

The INIT Lab is happy to announce that PhD student (and full-time UF CISE lecturer) Jeremiah Blanchard‘s work has been accepted for publication at the upcoming VL/HCC conference: the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages & Human-Centric Computing. The conference will be held in Memphis, TN, in October. The paper presents findings on how middle school […]

This summer, I was accepted as a participant in the ICER2017 Doctoral Consortium. It was a fantastic experience! The ACM partially funded my trip through a travel reimbursement, so I was able to attend the ICER2017 conference in Tacoma, WA, where I had the chance to meet and exchange ideas with experts who are passionate […]

It’s been a long time since my last update, so there’s lots to cover! As a recap, I have been investigating hybrid environments, which provide multiple representations of the same code. In particular, I’ve been looking into Pencil Code, which is a bi-directional environment – it lets students go back and forth between blocks and […]

In the last blog post, I wrote about how we completed our study – of a summer camp in which kids learned how to make games in Scratch – and how we were analyzing the data. We’ve completed that analysis and hope to see it published soon. Our analysis focuses on the impact prior programming […]

Over the summer, I ran a study with children ages 7-12 at a gaming summer camp in Winter Park, FL. The aim of this study was to begin to identify programming constructs students find motivating, and those they struggle with, in block-based environments. We ran the 1-week summer camp with three different student groups and […]