Computer Science and Software Engineering Education Research (CS-SEER)

The CS-SEER team undertakes research in the areas of computer science education and software engineering education. The researchers in this team are globally recognised as leaders in the field and active in the international computer science education research community.

The research undertaken by the CS-SEER team encompasses all aspects of the teaching, learning and assessment of computer science (CS) and software engineering (SE) from novice programmers to postgraduate studies and graduate industry onboarding to inclusive learning environments. We are interested in theoretical, pedagogical, and technological advances in the field and in finding ways to help tertiary students to learn by gaining insights into how they learn in the wild.

Our work includes research into:

• Development of professionalism, leadership, and team skills in undergraduate computer science and software engineering students
• Capstone projects and project-based learning
• Global software engineering education
• Psychology and cognitive theories and the cognitive development of novice programmers
• Online and technology enhanced teaching
• Development of novice software modelling and design skills
• Creativity in computing
• Feedback mechanisms for computer science students
• Computing curriculum development, implementation, and evaluation
• Programming pedagogy
• Attitudes and diversity in the computing classroom
• Gender and computing
• Teaching and learning of ethics and sustainability in computing

Current projects

• Bridging the gap between student and industry professional- funded through an ACM SIGCSE Special Projects Grant
• Creative programming assessment
• Self, co and socially shared regulation and their role in learning to program
• Development and assessment of novice software and database designers
• Investigations into teaching debugging and debugging strategies
• Integration of ethics and sustainability into project-based learning in computer science and software engineering courses
• Competency-based curriculum development

Research networks

The team has active collaborations with researchers from:

• Aalto University, Finland
• Abilene Christian University, United States
• Dalhousie University, Canada
• De Paul University, Chicago, United States
• Georgia State University, United States
• University College Dublin, Ireland
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
• University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada
• Uppsala Computing Education Research Group (UPCERG) - Uppsala University, Sweden
• The Irish Software Centre for Research – Lero, Ireland
• Computing Education and Learning Technology (CELT) Research Group at Auckland University, New Zealand.