Cyberbiosecurity is an emerging field at the convergence of life sciences and the digital world. As technological advances improve operational processes and expose them to vulnerabilities in agriculture and life sciences, cyberbiosecurity has become increasingly important for addressing contemporary concerns. Unfortunately, at this time,…

Successful development of an information system to solve a business problem depends on the analyst's ability to elicit system requirements from a user. This complex competency could be trained via critical peer evaluation of the requirements elicitation (RE) interviews. In this study, 294 students across four pre-pandemic and two COVID-19…

National failure rates seen in undergraduate introductory CS courses are quite high. In this paper, we develop a predictive model for student in-class performance in an introductory CS course. The model can serve as an early warning system, flagging struggling students who might benefit from additional support. We use a variety of features from…

Knowledge components (KCs) have many applications. In computing education, knowing the demonstration of specific KCs has been challenging. This paper introduces an entirely data-driven approach for: (1) discovering KCs; and (2) demonstrating KCs, using students' actual code submissions. Our system is based on two expected properties of KCs: (1)…

Background: Numerous efforts worldwide have been made to increase diversity in engineering and computer science (ECS), fields that pay well and promote upward mobility. However, in the United States (U.S.), females and students from underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups (URM) still pursue ECS training far less than do their peers. The…

Software Verification and Validation (SV&V) is proven to be an effective approach to ensure software quality. Yet it is not commonly deployed in industry practices. We started a project intent on building a sustainable community skilled in SV&V. The fundamental objective is the transformation of undergraduate education in software…

Recursion is one of the most important and hardest topics in lower division computer science courses. As it is an advanced programming skill, the best way to learn it is through targeted practice exercises. But the best practice problems are time consuming to manually grade by an instructor. As a consequence, students historically have completed…

Both computer science (CS) knowledge and workforce readiness skills (e.g., creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking) have equally grown in national importance to fill the growing pipeline of CS careers. Various factors have contributed to CS job shortages, which include a lack of student instruction on, engagement with,…

New computer science standards are being rapidly introduced at the elementary level but little is known about how to prepare teachers to learn and teach the content of these standards, or how to support students with disabilities in learning computer science. Accordingly, we designed and studied the Inclusive Computer Science Model of Professional…

Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork), founded in 2009 in the Virginia Tech Music Department's Digital and Interactive Sound & Intermedia Studio, "explores the power of gesture, communal interaction, and the multidimensionality of arts, as well as technology's potential to seamlessly integrate arts and sciences with particular focus on K-12…

This study takes a multidimensional approach to citation analysis, examining citations in multiple subfields of engineering, from both scholarly journals and doctoral dissertations. The three major goals of the study are to determine whether there are differences between citations drawn from dissertations and those drawn from journal articles; to…

More and more information technology (IT) programs are offering distance learning courses to their students. However, to date, there are a very limited number of published articles in the IT education literature that compare how different methods of delivering distance course relate to undergraduate students' learning outcomes in IT software…

This report presents the results of a review of all significant instructional efforts in the computer science discipline in Virginia institutions of higher education, with emphasis on those whose instructional activities constitute complete degree programs. The report is based largely on information provided by the institutions in self-studies. A…

This report organizes findings of an exploration of changing job skills in Virginia which combined the points of view of various analysts with information provided by employers. Part One contains some background material: a brief history of occupations in Virginia, a description of recent trends, an explanation of the mechanisms that bring about…

Discusses results of a survey of Virginia's public high schools that was conducted to determine the progress that had been made in integrating computers into the classroom based on the 1984 guidelines released by the Virginia Department of Education. Difficulties with hardware and software, teacher characteristics, and teacher training are…