How natural is natural language?

Understanding the development of professional identity in Computer Science (CS) undergraduate students can help better evaluate CS degree program's effectiveness in preparing students for their career goals. This poster presents findings from a study where we surveyed 105 CS undergraduate students about their self-perceptions of technical competencies in their chosen CS professions, the mechanisms to develop their competencies, as well as their motivations behind attaining these skill sets. Preliminary analysis of this data indicates that most CS students (93.3%), identified themselves into 7 different computing professions including Software Engineering (81.0%), Web Development (37.1%), User Experience (19.0%), and Computer Security (12.4%). They indicated using multiple mechanisms to develop their technical competencies including coursework, internship/professional experience, and research. Motivations behind their learning included self-interest as well as industry demands. We analyzed the relationships between students' skill proficiencies, motivations, and mechanisms for learning and found differences between novice, intermediate, and advanced learners. We found that students who self-assessed their proficiencies as novices in their chosen professional identity had a single mechanism for learning, most commonly coursework preparation. On the other hand, students who rated themselves as intermediate or advanced learners had multiple mechanisms and motivational factors behind attaining their skill set. These findings are important for better understanding students' learning needs and career aspirations. CS departments can use this information for better aligning their degree programs to student goals and creating pathways that ensure the development of CS students professional identity.

Undergraduate dental curriculum consisting of digital tools is essential in today's era of modern dentistry. The aim of this study was to evaluate final-year undergraduate dental students' perception of using intraoral scanners and the feasibility of increasing exposure to intraoral scanners in their undergraduate programme. Forty students volunteered to complete one maxillary conventional and optical impression (TRIOS 3, 3Shape A/S). Questionnaires were used to assess their familiarity, perceived confidence levels, difficulties and user-friendliness of each technique using a visual analogue scale prior to and after experiencing each impression technique. Students felt more familiar with conventional (C) than digital (D) impressions (P=.00). Their pre-confidence level was also higher with the conventional method (C: 80.9±15.5; D: 39.6±25.5); however, the post-confidence level significantly increased for the digital impression technique (P=.00). Participants perceived conventional technique to be easier (P=.02) and faster than optical impressions (P=.03). User-friendliness of the intraoral scanner scored moderate (67.7±22.9). The difference in the mean total working time was not significant (P=.05). Forty per cent of participants indicated that they preferred using the digital impression technique. Although final-year undergraduate students still perceived the conventional impression technique to be easier and faster than digital scanning, there was a significant increase in the level of confidence by this cohort after only one occasion of clinical optical impressions. Undergraduate dental students are ready to uptake new technology, and it should be strongly considered to incorporate more digital scanning during their training.

In the realm of software development, collaboration is important for worker satisfaction, mitigating turnover risks and better design of final products. The quality of collaboration in teams can indirectly assessed by the interdependence of team members’ designs and the extent of shared authorship within a system. Our goal is to apply Social Network Analysis to visualize collaboration on software teams. This study is situated within the framework of software projects undertaken by undergraduate Computer Science students in a 3-week programming sprint. Detailed data from the software development process was gathered through Github and further analyzed using a two-mode social network and later a regular social network. Our results indicate that these techniques help illuminate certain facets of collaboration, such as members that are isolated from the team or collaborators that tend to concentrate too much work.

Dear Readers, At the end of this year, it gives me great pleasure to announce the twelfth regular issue of 2024. In this issue, various topical aspects of computer science are covered in 5 articles by 14 authors from 5 countries. I would like to thank all the authors for their sound research and the editorial board for the highly valuable review effort and suggestions for improvement. These contributions, together with the generous support of the consortium members, maintain the quality of our journal. I am looking forward to continuing my work as Managing Editor-in-Chief with the J.UCS community also in 2025.  In an ongoing effort to further strengthen our journal, I would like to expand the editorial board: If you are a tenured associate professor or above with a strong publication record, you are welcome to apply to join our editorial board. We are also interested in high-quality proposals for special issues on new topics and trends. Please consider yourself and encourage your colleagues to submit high-quality articles or special issue proposals to our journal. Finally, we are preparing to join the KOALA Cluster for Computer Science and Mathematics, making some minor organizational adjustments. We are switching to the CC BY license, and all metadata is accessible under the CC0 license. We are very grateful for the financial support for the next three years.  In this regular issue, I am very pleased to introduce the following 5 accepted articles: Marija Kuštelega, Renata Mekovec, and Ahmed Shareef from Croatia have conducted a systematic literature review to find out how the current research on the digital twin implementations has been positioned in front of practical challenges focused on privacy and security issues. Mehtap Ülker and A. Bedri Özer from Turkiye address in their research a fine-tuning BART-based model which generates a scientific summary by selecting important words from the text of the input document. Alessander Osorio, Paulo Roberto Ferreira Jr., and Gerson Geraldo H. Cavalheiro from Brazil introduce a case study conducted with undergraduate and graduate students in Computer Science, involving guided reading of scientific papers, and recording students’ perceptions of adherence to a set of guidelines for the presentation of scientific results. Ruan Visser, Trieko Grobler, and Marcel Dunaiski from South Africa address the gap in natural language processing for Southern African languages, and present an in-depth analysis of language model development under resource-constrained conditions. Last but not least, Seyedeh Aridis Ahadi, Kian Jazayeri, and Sahand Tebyani from Cyprus propose in their research an integrated framework for the identification of suicidal thoughts in social media through the implementation of a layered classifier model consisting of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a long short-term memory (LSTM) model. Season greetings to all of you, relaxing holidays and ‘Enjoy Reading’!  Best regards, Christian Gütl, Managing Editor-in-Chief Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

Teaching and learning operating system (OS) design is a core part of computer science education, which is highly demanding for both teaching and learning. This paper presents a tool-centric framework that aims at enhancing teaching operating system design for undergraduate students in computer science. The framework integrates multiple educational tools and methodologies with the aim of making the course more appealing for students while improving their comprehension and hands-on experience in OS design. The proposed framework extends existing educational theories and practices by focusing on aspects such as computational thinking, collaborative learning, and gamification in the learning process. The theoretical basics of this framework, the practical use of such a framework, and the expected influence on students’ learning outcome will be further explained in this paper. Empirical evidence, detailed examples and comparisons with existing frameworks underscore its potential impact on student learning outcomes.

Undergraduate computer science students can have difficulty understanding quicksort and other divide-and-conquer sorting algorithms. It is important to understand how students think about quicksort in order to find out how to better teach the students, and also for those students to be able to write and analyze these algorithms for their own use. Data was collected from two interviews, each about an hour long, with undergraduate computer science students. The data was then qualitatively analyzed in order to draw conclusions on how the students approached the coding of the quicksort algorithm. Both interview participants were able to quickly and efficiently write quicksort using linked lists. However, both students struggled when asked to rewrite their algorithms using static arrays. From the transcripts and hand-written notes taken from the two interviews, it seems plausible that their issues stem from challenges with their treatment of the pivot in the array implementation. Additionally, the array implementation may have caused the participants to change the visualization of the algorithm to which they had grown accustomed, further accentuating their difficulties. While both students showed obvious proficiency with the linked-list algorithm, they failed to realize key intuitions when attempting to make their algorithms space-efficient by using a single array. Future work may include analysis of other divide-and-conquer algorithms, as well as a closer look into how visualizations of sorting algorithms affect student understanding.

Most studies of gender and computer science have been conducted (out of necessity) in gender-imbalanced environments. The findings often point to significant gender differences, leading the researchers to recommend strategies to meet these differences. One such recommendation is to adopt a female-friendly, contextual approach to curriculum development.1 In contrast, based on our recent and ongoing studies of undergraduate computer science (CS) students at Carnegie Mellon University, we hypothesize that in a more balanced environment, gender differences tend to dissolve. That is, the spectrum of interests, motivation, and personality types of men and of women becomes more alike than different. This leads us to be considerably more pragmatic in our recommendations for effective and positive change. Indeed, we believe that recommendations for curricular changes based on presumed gender differences can be misguided and may help reinforce, even perpetuate, stereotypes. Here, we describe some of the changes in the culture of computing as our undergraduate CS environment has become more balanced in three critical domains: gender, the mix of students and breadth of their interests, and the professional experiences afforded all students. Brief Background for the Evolving Culture In 1995, just 7percent (7 out of 96) of the entering freshmen CS majors at Carnegie Mellon were women. Since 1999, the percentage has increased nearly fivefold (on average, 45 out of 132), challenging trends across the country.2 Two major factors have contributed to the dramatic increase of women in CS at Carnegie Mellon: an outreach program for high school CS teachers that combined technical training with discussions of gender-gap issues and a broadened admissions policy (emphasizing diverse interests—along with high [End Page 110] achievement in mathematics and science—and de-emphasizing prior programming experience). To meet the needs of students with varying backgrounds, multiple entry routes were built into the first-year programming sequence.3 The subsequent creation of the proactive student organization Women@SCS has been catalytic in building an environment in which the new student body can flourish.4 Women@SCS explicitly provides crucial educational and professional experiences generally taken for granted by the majority in the community but typically unavailable for the minority participants.5 Many of these experiences are casual and often happen in social settings. For example, in an undergraduate CS program, male students often have the opportunity to discuss homework with roommates, with friends late at night, or over meals. Course and job information and recommendations are passed down from upperclassmen, from fraternity files, or from friends. Women students, being in the minority, do not have access to—in fact are often excluded from—these implicit and important advantages. As one proceeds into the professional world, similar phenomena occur. These key actions, and implications for other venues, are discussed further at the end of this paper. Our recent study, based on a set of interviews with seniors in the class of 2002, may be viewed to a limited degree as a follow-up to the intensive longitudinal studies of CS students at Carnegie Mellon carried out by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher between 1995 and 1999.6 Their studies, funded by the Sloan Foundation and discussed in Unlocking the Clubhouse, were undertaken to help understand differences in male and female students' engagement (attachment, persistence, and detachment) with computer science, with a special focus on the gender imbalance in the field.7 A major goal was to devise and effect changes in recruitment, curriculum, pedagogy, and culture to encourage the broadest possible participation in the computing enterprise. Unlocking the Clubhouse paints a bleak picture for women in the undergraduate computer science program in the 1990s, one that still resonates with many CS programs across the nation. Margolis and Fisher note that for the most part, "women who were enthusiastic about computing find their confidence and interest extinguished in the college years."8 Consequently, many of the (few) women students who entered the...

Burnout remains a global challenge affecting productivity and wellbeing of students of all academic levels. Despite the harmful effects of burnout among health science students, academic burnout is poorly characterized in the Cameroonian context. The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence and factors associated with academic burnout among undergraduate health science students of Saint Louis University Institute Douala and Yaoundé Campuses, Cameroon. This was an analytic cross-sectional study carried out at the St. Louis University Institute, Douala and Yaoundé campuses from the 9th of January to the 9th of February 2024. Convenience sampling technique was used to enroll undergraduate health science students. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data on the sociodemographic characteristics and factors associated with burnout. The Burnout Clinical Subtype Questionnaire (BCSQ-12-SS) was used to determine the prevalence of burnout, and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) was used to assess perceived stress. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for analysis. Multivariate logistic regression was performed to examine the association between the variables and burnout. Among the 570 health science students enrolled in the study, 439 (77%) were females. The most represented age group was between 16 and 25 years, 481 (84.4%). Majority of the study participants, 259 (45.4%) were in level 200, and most, 254 (44.6%) were from the nursing department. The prevalence of burnout was found to be 47% (268/570). Academic workload (p = 0.038), lack of support from friends and teachers (p = 0.046), study and life pressures (p < 0.001), perceived stress (p = 0.041), and school level (p = 0.002) were significantly associated with academic burnout. We report a high prevalence of burnout among undergraduate health science students. Study and life pressures, academic workload, perceived stress, and being a Level one student were found to be significantly associated with burnout. This will help to inform preventive measures by universities to reduce the burnout burden.

Visualization of VHDL-based simulations as a pedagogical tool for supporting computer science education

Digital technology is reshaping the landscape of higher education, especially in the field of computer science. As digital platforms become central to the learning process, understanding student engagement in these continuously evolving environments is increasingly vital. This study explores the current state of online learning among undergraduate computer science students, investigates factors influencing their engagement, and proposes strategies to enhance online education. The research framework is grounded in the TPACK model, behaviorist learning theory, learning engagement theory, and situated cognition learning theory, encompassing student characteristics, multidimensional online learning engagement, and key influencing factors. Data on participants’ basic attributes, levels of engagement, and the major determinants of these engagement levels were collected via a questionnaire survey. Analyses using SPSS 25.0—employing t-tests, ANOVA, and Pearson correlation—revealed significant trends and relationships. Findings show a notable positive correlation between the duration of online learning and overall engagement, whereas gender, home location, and academic major exerted relatively limited influence. Subjective intention, attitude, and motivation emerged as crucial determinants, and interactions with instructors and Peers—reinforced by teaching approaches and feedback—played an essential role in fostering emotional involvement. Building on these insights, the study recommends initiatives to strengthen self-motivation, nurture meaningful online interactions, enhance technical support systems, and reinforce mechanisms for assessing learning outcomes. This work provides empirical evidence for a deeper understanding of online education while indicating directions for ongoing improvement.

Traditionally beginning undergraduate computer science students are taught a high level programming language. Since the early 1970's Pascal has become the de facto standard introductory programming language. With the creation of Ada, its standardization, and the availability of validated compilers, there is considerable discussion concerning the introduction of Ada into the computer science curriculum. This paper discusses the approach taken by the Computer Science Department at Harvey Mudd College.

Belonging uncertainty, defined as the general concern about the quality of one’s social relationships in an academic setting, has been found to be an important determinant of academic achievement and persistence. However, to date, only little research investigated the sources of belonging uncertainty. To address this research gap, we examined three potential sources of belonging uncertainty in a sample of undergraduate computer science students in Germany (N = 449) and focused on (a) perceived affective and academic exclusion by fellow students, (b) domain-specific academic self-efficacy beliefs, and (c) perception of one’s individual performance potential compared to that of fellow students in the field. Perceived affective and academic exclusion by fellow students and domain-specific academic self-efficacy beliefs were significant predictors of female students’ uncertainty about belonging in computer science. The perception of one’s individual performance potential in comparison to that of fellow students, however, was a relevant predictor of both male and female students’ belonging uncertainty in computer science. Our findings imply an expanded view of the theoretical concept of belonging uncertainty that goes beyond mere concerns of social connectedness.

This is the final report for the Department of Energy (DOE) project DE-FG02-06ER25746, entitled, "Continuing High Performance Computing Research and Education at AAMU". This three-year project was started in August 15, 2006, and it was ended in August 14, 2009. The objective of this project was to enhance high performance computing research and education capabilities at Alabama A&M University (AAMU), and to train African-American and other minority students and scientists in the computational science field for eventual employment with DOE. AAMU has successfully completed all the proposed research and educational tasks. Through the support of DOE, AAMU was able to provide opportunities to minority students through summer interns and DOE computational science scholarship program. In the past three years, AAMU (1). Supported three graduate research assistants in image processing for hypersonic shockwave control experiment and in computational science related area; (2). Recruited and provided full financial support for six AAMU undergraduate summer research interns to participate Research Alliance in Math and Science (RAMS) program at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL); (3). Awarded highly competitive 30 DOE High Performance Computing Scholarships ($1500 each) to qualified top AAMU undergraduate students in science and engineering majors; (4). Improved high performance computing laboratory at AAMU with the addition of three high performance Linux workstations; (5). Conducted image analysis for electromagnetic shockwave control experiment and computation of shockwave interactions to verify the design and operation of AAMU-Supersonic wind tunnel. The high performance computing research and education activities at AAMU created great impact to minority students. As praised by Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) in 2009, ?The work on high performance computing that is funded by the Department of Energy provides scholarships to undergraduate students as computational science scholars. This is a wonderful opportunity to recruit under-represented students.? Three ASEE papers were published in 2007, 2008 and 2009 proceedings of ASEE Annual Conferences, respectively. Presentations of these papers were also made at the ASEE Annual Conferences. It is very critical to continue the research and education activities.

To attract and encourage the best and the brightest students to pursue state, federal and tribal government careers in cybersecurity, the National Science Foundation's CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service (SFS) program was created and funded in 2000 as part of the Federal Cyber Services training and education initiative. Only institutions with a strong and established academic program in cybersecurity are eligible to participate in the CyberCorps SFS program. For the past four years, Towson University (TU) has offered CyberCorps scholarships to highly-qualified undergraduate students in computer science with a track in computer security. The poster describes the TU cybersecurity curriculum and the extracurricular activities that have been essential in bringing the CyberCorps SFS program to TU and recruiting qualified undergraduate students, as well as, challenges and lessons learned.

Undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students are graduating with insufficient communication skills, thereby diminishing their employability and upward socio-economic mobility. The purpose of this action research study was to explore ways of improving the alignment between academic outcomes and employer needs related to communication skills for undergraduate STEM students at a large, private university in the northeastern United States. Participants for Cycle 1 of this study included academic advisors and career services/cooperative education (CS/CE) staff members experienced in assisting undergraduate computer science and information technology (CSIT) students at the research site. Based on Cycle 1 findings and a review of the extant literature, an action step was designed, implemented, and evaluated in Cycle 2 to explore potential changes to a required first-year experience (RFE). A Recommendations Working Group (RWG) comprising students, alumni, staff, and faculty convened to achieve these outcomes. Evaluation of the study's results was based on RWG members' feedback on the efficacy of the group's constitution, facilitation, and process as well as College101 administration assessments of the RWG's co-created recommendations. The study concluded that peer modeling and interaction are valuable for strengthening undergraduate student communication skills, high-quality facilitation and instruction are critical for effective cultivation of undergraduate communication skills, and holistic institutional commitment to developing undergraduate student communication skills may improve outcomes. Implications for higher education institutions include that undergraduate STEM student communication skills development can be supported by leveraging peer modeling and interaction; attending to the qualifications, training, and support of associated facilitators and instructors; and ensuring that existing programming and units charged with cultivating these skills are aligned and sufficiently supported.--Author's abstract