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Research Talk
2/26/2018 01:30 pm
Hill 350 (The IDEA room)

Experiences with smart content systems for teaching to program

Marcos J Gómez, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina

Faculty Host: Thu Nguyen

Abstract

In this talk I’m going to present our experiences with two systems for teaching to program: UNCDuino designed for initial and elementary school, and Mumuki designed for beginners at university level. UNCDuino is an open source educational software we developed for teaching to program a robotic kit in C++ and Python. Besides of these two industry programming languages, UNCDuino can be programmed using 2 high level languages based on blocks. One of them is completely iconic allowing for its use with preliterate children. Mumuki is another open source platform, which is publicly available on the Internet and provides formative feedback and assessment over more than a thousand exercises in 7 programming languages. Mumuki uses compilers, test cases and static code analysis over abstract syntax trees in order to generate formative feedback. It logs the interaction with the students allowing also for educational data mining.

Bio

Marcos J. Gómez is a Computer Science Ph.D student at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina. He has a Masters degree in CS and for the past 5 years has been working on Computer Science Education.  In 2013 he was part of a Google Fellowship and currently holds a National Fellowship to promote CS education thought different projects. He has worked extensively in teacher Professional Development programs that have reached hundreds of teachers and tens of thousands of K-12 students.  He has conducted research on teaching CS with different platforms and has developed UNCDuino, a multilanguage platform designed to learn to program robots that is widely used nationally.  He is also a CS teacher at a primary school and at a low income high school.