Revolutionizing CS Education: Marquette Students Shine at ACM Symposium

At the recent Association for Computing Machinery SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in Portland, Oregon, seven students from Marquette’s Department of Computer Science represented the department. The conference is ACM’s flagship international event that addresses educator challenges in computing education and promotes idea exchange on curricula and teaching methods.

One of the standout presentations at the conference was by Sam Mazzone, a first-year doctoral student and undergraduate alumnus from the class of 2023. Mazzone won third place in the ACM Student Research Competition for his work on “Energizing Web Development in the Exploring Computer Science Curriculum.” His research focused on analyzing data from the Exploring Computer Science Web Lab (ECS-WL) curriculum to evaluate its effectiveness and make curriculum adjustments to ensure inclusive computer science education.

Another innovative project presented at the conference was by doctoral students Jack Forden and Alex Gebhard, along with undergraduate REU fellow Oliver Laufenberg. They presented a research paper on their curriculum development project, “Using Embedded Xinu to Teach Operating Systems on Baremetal RISC-V.” This project is groundbreaking as it combines Embedded Xinu, a standard for teaching operating system concepts, with RISC-V, a system used by companies such as Google, Nvidia, and Huawei.

Other students from Marquette who presented their work at the conference include 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). All of these students showcased innovative research and curriculum development projects at this prestigious conference.