Marquette shines in computer science education at global event

Seven students from Marquette’s Department of Computer Science attended the Association for Computing Machinery SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in Portland, Oregon. This conference is ACM’s leading international event focused on addressing educator challenges in computing education and facilitating the exchange of ideas on curriculum and teaching methods.

Among the attendees was first-year doctoral student and undergraduate alumnus Sam Mazzone, Arts ’23, who received the third place award from the ACM Student Research Competition for his work on “Energizing Web Development in the Exploring Computer Science Curriculum.” Mazzone’s research analyzed data from the Exploring Computer Science Web Lab (ECS-WL) curriculum to evaluate its effectiveness and create adaptations to ensure inclusive computer science education.

Doctoral students Jack Forden and Alex Gebhard, along with undergraduate REU fellow Oliver Laufenberg, presented a research paper on their project, “Using Embedded Xinu to Teach Operating Systems on Baremetal RISC-V.” This project combined the teaching standard Embedded Xinu with RISC-V, a widely used system by companies such as Google, Nvidia, and Huawei.

Other students presenting at the conference included doctoral student Sujeeth Ramagoni (Analyzing State-Level High School CS Teacher Certification Through Dataset Exploration), doctoral student Maverick Berner and undergraduate REU fellow Max Berner (Co-Designing Integrated CS Curriculum Artifacts with K-5 Classroom Teachers), and research associate Heidi Williams (Becoming Core: Curriculum Planning Tools for Integrating CS into K-5 Content Areas). Each student showcased their innovative research and contributions to the field of computer science education.