[Colloq] Talk - Kathi Fisler - WPI - 12/12, 10:00am, 366 WVH - The Recurring Rainfall Problem

[Biron, Jessica]

Kathi Fisler, Professor, WPI
Talk: Friday 12/12, 10:00am, 366 WVH


The Recurring Rainfall Problem

Soloway's Rainfall problem, a classic benchmark in computing education research, has proven difficult for many CS1 students.  Rainfall tests students' abilities at plan composition, the task of integrating code fragments that implement subparts of a problem into a single program.
Nearly all prior studies of Rainfall have involved students who were learning imperative programming with arrays.  In my recent multi-university study, students learning functional programming produced atypical profiles of compositions and errors on Rainfall.
The differences have interesting implications for the questions and methodologies we use to study plan composition.

The talk will also discuss pedagogic uses of peer review.  While some studies have explored peer review of code, none have considered review of test suites.  I present an overview of observations and results from a multi-course study in which students peer reviewed test suites prior to submitting implementations.  Our observations prompt more general thoughts on using peer review to target broad objectives for computing education.

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Kathi Fisler is a Professor of Computer Science at WPI, as well as the director of WPI's academic cybersecurity program.  Her research has explored modular verification of feature-oriented software systems, formal analysis of access-control policies, diagrammatic logic, and computing education.  Understanding how people reason through formal systems has been an underlying theme throughout her work.  Kathi also co-directs Bootstrap, an outreach project that integrates algebra and introductory computing in a curriculum for middle-school math courses.
The Bootstrap team has trained hundreds of teachers nationwide, and has recently been selected as the middle-school computing-in-math curriculum for each of Code.org, CSNYC, and MassCAN.