The Experiment Kit Page

This page contains details of the "experiment kits" devised for Computing and Engineering Education Research over the period 2002-2007. Each kit was prepared in advance, and then presented to a group of researchers. Each researcher gathered data (in accordance with the design of the kit) in their own classrooms, and then came together again to analyse the data in aggregate and write a paper.

On this page, for each kit, there is:

  • A link to the project pages for the workshops
  • The original kit
  • The Technical Report (always the first publication resulting from the work)
  • Other papers which are relevant to the work of the kit, published subsequently

So, for those interested in the construction and execution of experiment kits, reading the kit and associated technial report will give the best overview. For those interested in the results of the work (and in reading more polished prose) then the "other publications" may be a better way in. A complete list of publications relating to the Computer Science projects, up to March 2006, is available.

For those interested in undertaking similar endeavours, here is a pre-print of a paper examining the design of this kind of work, presented at the first International Computing Education Research conference in Seattle in October 2005. The final version is available from the ACM Digital Library

And here is a pre-print of a paper looking at the kind of community that such projects aspire to create and support.

There is no "manual" for the content of these workshops, but an outline of the kind of material we included can be found as the first part of Computer Science Education Research, edited by Sally Fincher & Marian Petre and published by Routledge-Falmer, 2004. Here is an early version.

Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science Education

Scaffolding Research in Computer Science Education

Building Research in Australasian Computing Education (BRACE)

Stepping Stones: Investigating Engineering Education
Project pages Project pages Project pages Project pages
Experiment Kit Experiment Kit Experiment Kit Experiment Kit
"My Criterion is: Is it a Boolean?": A card-sort elicitation of students' knowledge of programming constructs
Technical Report 6-03, Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK, June 2003		 Cause for alarm?: A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software designs
Technical Report 16-04, Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK, September 2004.		 Programmed to succeed?: A multi-national, multi-institutional study of introductory programming courses
Technical Report 1-05, Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK, April 2005.		 What is the word for “engineering” in Swedish?: Swedish students conceptions of their discipline
Technical Report 2007-018, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, June 2007.
Other publications:

Sally Fincher and Josh Tenenberg edited a Special Issue of Expert Systems (vol 22, issue 3, July 2005). This contained 5 papers that were about, or based on, the Bootstrapping project. They are highlighted in the list below.

Table of contents:

  • Making Sense of Card Sorting Data
    Sally Fincher & Josh Tenenberg
  • The sorting techniques: A tutorial on card sorts
    Gordon Rugg & Peter McGeorge
  • Women's working wardrobes: A study using card sorts
    Sue Gerrard & Julie Dickinson
  • That site looks 88.46% familiar: quantifying similarity of Web page design
    Giselle Martine & Gordon Rugg
  • A multi-institutional, multi-national study of programming concepts using card-sort data
    Kate Sanders, Sally Fincher, Dennis Bouvier et. al.
  • Using edit distance to analyze card sorts
    Kate Deibel, Richard Anderson & Ruth Anderson
  • Measuring card sort orthogonality
    Timothy Fossum & Susan Haller
  • What do successful computer scientists know?
    Renee McCauley, Laurie Murphy, Suzanne Westbrook et. al.
 Other publications:
  • A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software designs Sally Fincher, Marian Petre, Josh Tenenberg et. al. Proceedings of 4th Annual Finnish/Baltic Sea Conference on Computer Science Education, Sept. 2004, pp 20-28
  • Students designing software: a multi-national, multi-institutional study Josh Tenenberg, Sally Fincher, Ken Blaha, et. al. Informatics in Education International Journal 2005, vol.4 no.1 pp143-162
 Other publications:

Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science Education and Scaffolding Research in Computer Science Education were supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grants DUE-0122560 and DUE-0243242 respectively. The Stepping Stones project was funded by Rådet för högre utbildning (the Swedish Council for Renewal of Higher Education) and by Myndigheten för nätverk och samarbete inom högre utbildning (the Swedish Agency for Networks and Cooperation in Higher Education). It was run within the context of the Nationellt ämnesdidaktiskt Centrum för Teknikutbildning i Studenternas Sammanhang project (CeTUSS), a national centre for pedagogical development in technology education in a societal and student oriented context. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of these supporting bodies

This collection compiled and maintained by Sally Fincher. It was created on the 17th of March 2005, and last updated on the 7th August 2008. It is available from http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/saf/experiment-kits/index.html