Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences

Congratulations to Christine Tablatin, Maureen Villamor, and Dr. Mercedes Rodrigo on the awards they had received from the Philippine Computing Science Congress (PCSC)!

The PCSC is an annual conference in computing that is organized by the Computing Society of the Philippines to enable computing educators, researchers, ICT professionals, and students to interact and to share their work in computing, computer science, computer engineering, computational science, and information and communications technology (ICT). The conference features contributed research papers and special lectures by prominent researchers and educators in the field of computing, ICT, and related fields.

The Philippine Information Technology Journal (PITJ) is a peer-reviewed research journal that features computing applications in the area of Information Technology.  This is co-published by CSP with the Philippine Society of IT Educators (PSITE).

We are pleased to announce that 5 submissions from ALLS have been accepted for the PITJ Special Issue on Eye Tracking. Below is the complete ALLS lineup:

• Japheth Samaco, Jo Cortez: An Experience Report on Gathering Eye Trace Data during a Novice Programmer Tracing and Debugging Experiment
• Christine Tablatin: Preliminary Analysis of Common Code Reading Patterns using Scanpath Trend Analysis
• Maureen Mamilic-Villamor: Who’s Following Who? Investigating Lag Times in a Pair Tracing and Debugging Eye Tracking Experiment
• Celesamae Tangub Vicente, myself, Hong-Fa Ho, Guan-An Chen: Analysis on Visual Attention of Students Solving Physics Playground Problems
• John David Castro, Ezekiel Adriel Lagmay, Harold Lim: A Preliminary Comparative Analysis of High Performing and Low Performing Students in Debugging

To register, click here.

Dr. Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo was recently involved in the publication of an online book on Digital Learning for Development, entitled, Learning Analytics for the Global South. The book considers how the collection, analysis, and use of data about learners and their contexts have the potential to broaden access to quality education and improve the efficiency of educational processes and systems in developing countries around the world.

Experts from Africa (Paul Prinsloo of the University of South Africa), Mainland China (Bodong Chen of the University of Minnesota, USA and Yizhou Fan of Peking University, People’s Republic of China), Southeast Asia (Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo of the Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines), and Latin America (Cristóbal Cobo and Cecilia Aguerrebere, both of the Ceibal Foundation, Uruguay) situate the potential of learning analytics to support critical digital learning and education imperatives, such as quality learning at scale and the acquisition of 21st century skills, within their respective regional contexts, framing their responses around six key questions:

What are the main trends and challenges in education in your region?
How can learning analytics address these challenges?
What models of learning analytics adoption would be most effective in your region?
What are the barriers to the adoption of learning analytics in your region and how could these be mitigated?
How do you envision ethical use and privacy protection in connection with learning analytics being addressed in your region?
How can the operationalization of learning analytics be future-proofed in your region?

To download a copy, please visit Digital Learning for Development.

PCSC is annual conference in computing that is organized by the Computing Society of the Philippines to enable computing educators, researchers, ICT professionals, and students to interact and to share their work in computing, computer science, computer engineering, computational science, and information and communications technology (ICT). The conference features contributed research papers and special lectures by prominent researchers and educators in the field of computing, ICT, and related fields.

The following papers were accepted this year:

Christine Tablatin. Analysis of Static Code Reading Patterns
Abstract: Code reading is a prerequisite of program comprehension and is defined as a process of visually perceiving the source code with the focus of understanding how the code works as well as finding bugs and defects. Strategies employed on code reading affect a programmer’s success rate of the comprehension tasks. However, little is known about the code reading patterns or visual strategies used by the students during programming tasks. We study how high performing and low performing students read source code while performing a static code reading task of identifying bugs and use eye tracking data to reveal their common code reading patterns. Results showed that high performing students spend less fixation durations and have less number of fixations on the loca-tions of code errors compared to low performing students. A common scanpath was generated which describes the code read-ing patterns employed by students of different skill levels. This is a preliminary analysis and further studies with larger data sample would be conducted to be able to validate and generalize these results.

Maureen Mamilic-Villamor. Do friends collaborate and perform better? : A Pair Program Tracing and Debugging Eye Tracking Experiment

Congratulations to the ALLS papers that were accepted to the Philippine Computing Society Congress 2018!