RadGrad is a curriculum initiative implemented via an application that combines features of social networks, degree planners, individual learning plans, and serious games. RadGrad redefines traditional meanings of "progress" and "success" in the undergraduate computer science degree program in an attempt to improve engagement, retention, and diversity. In this paper, we describe the RadGrad Project and report on an evaluation study designed to assess the impact of RadGrad on student engagement, diversity, and retention. We also present opportunities and challenges that result from the use of the system.

Purpose As the field of Computer Science (CS) continues to diversify and expand, the need for undergraduates to explore career possibilities and develop personalized study paths has never been greater. This reality presents a challenge for CS departments. How do the students striving to become competent professionals in an ever-changing field of study? How do they do this efficiently and effectively? This study addresses such questions by introducing RadGrad, an online application combining features of social networks, degree planners and serious games. Design/methodology/approach RadGrad application is designed to promote participation in extracurricular activities, value real-world experience and provide guidance for students planning their degrees. What follows is an exploration of how the application was designed, along with an analysis of how students used it in its first year. Findings Findings suggest RadGrad helped students to participate in relevant community activities and take an active role in planning their degrees. Originality/value The paper describes the features of the application, introducing how the concept of Innovation, Competence and Experience (ICE) scores – rather than a GPAs – were used to motivate undergraduates to participate in extracurricular activities. Initial results suggest RadGrad and the concept ICE scores can be applied to any field where students are encouraged to gain real-world experience as part of their degree program. Lessons learned and future directions are discussed.

RadGrad is a curriculum initiative implemented via a web-based application that combines features of social networks, degree planners, and serious games. RadGrad redefines the traditional meaning of "progress" and "success" in the undergraduate computer science degree program, with the ultimate goal of improving student engagement, diversity, and retention. In this paper, we relate RadGrad to other curriculum initiatives, overview its key functionality, present results from an evaluation conducted during its first year of deployment, and discuss our lessons learned and future directions.

Despite the perceived value of extracurricular experience, higher education relies heavily on grade point average (GPA) as a measure of undergraduates’ academic success. When used as a singular standard assessment, GPA, which is based on student progress and completion of coursework, may inadvertently steer undergraduates away from valuable out-of-class experiences that might enhance their employability after graduation. With this premise in mind, the current study proposes to supplement GPA scores in an undergraduate Computer Science program with a wholistic assessment known as an Innovation, Competency, and Experience (ICE) score. The ICE score is a point system for documenting and rewarding students’ extracurricular activities, in addition to their GPA scores. We designed and developed a web-based technology platform called RadGrad to implement ICE scores and promote student engagement and participation in extracurricular activities. Preliminary data shows that over 36% of students started to use RadGrad, even though its use was completely voluntary. More than half of those students planned and participated in various extracurricular activities, ultimately earning ICE points. Importantly, the ICE score deployed through RadGrad demonstrates the potential value of a supplemental assessment to GPA, which can promote extracurricular experiences relevant to students’ future careers beyond coursework.

Sustainability education and conservation have become an international imperative due to the rising cost of energy, increasing scarcity of natural resource and irresponsible environmental practices. This paper presents Makahiki, an open source serious game framework for sustainability, which implements an extensible framework for different organizations to develop sustainability games. It provides a variety of built-in games and content focused on sustainability; game mechanics such as leaderboards, points, and badges; a variety of common services such as authentication, real-time game analytics and ability to deploy to the cloud, as well as a responsive user interface for both computer and mobile devices. The successful implementation of six sustainability educational games in different organizations provided evidence regarding the ability to customize the Makahiki framework successfully to different environments in both organizational and infrastructure aspects. A serious game stakeholder experience based access method (SGSEAM) was used to formally evaluate Makahiki in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Makahiki as a useful serious game framework for sustainability.

Assessment of serious game frameworks is emerging as an important area of research. This paper describes an assessment mechanism called the Serious Game Stakeholder Experience Assessment Method (SGSEAM). SGSEAM is designed to provide detailed insights into the strengths and shortcomings of serious game frameworks through a stakeholder perspective based approach. In this paper, we report on the use of SGSEAM to assess Makahiki, an open source serious game framework for sustainability. Our results provide useful insights into both Makahiki as a serious game framework and SGSEAM as an assessment method.

To achieve the full benefits of the Smart Grid, end users must become active participants in the energy ecosystem. This paper presents the Kukui Cup challenge, a serious game designed around the topic of energy conservation which incorporates a variety of energy feedback visualizations, a multifaceted serious game with online educational activities, and real-world activities such as workshops and excursions. We describe our experiences in developing energy feedback visualizations in the Kukui Cup based on in-lab evaluations and field studies in college residence halls. We learned that energy feedback systems should address these factors: they should be actionable, that domain knowledge must go hand in hand with energy feedback systems, and that this feedback must be “sticky” to lead to changes in behaviors and attitudes. Keywords-Serious games; energy feedback; energy; energy literacy; smart grid.

Pedagogies such as the Personal Software Process (PSP) shift metrics definition, collection, and analysis from the organizational level to the individual level. While case study research indicates that the PSP can provide software engineering students with empirical support for improving estimation and quality assurance, there is little evidence that many students continue to use the PSP when no longer required to do so. Our research suggests that this "PSP adoption problem" may be due to two problems: the high overhead of PSP-style metrics collection and analysis, and the requirement that PSP users "context switch" between product development and process recording. This paper overviews our initial PSP experiences, our first attempt to solve the PSP adoption problem with the LEAP system, and our current approach called Hackystat. This approach fully automates both data collection and analysis, which eliminates overhead and context switching. However, Hackystat changes the kind of metrics data that is collected, and introduces new privacy-related adoption issues of its own.

After using and teaching the Personal Software Process (PSP) (W.S. Humphrey, 1995) for over four years, the author came to appreciate the insights and benefits that it produced. However, there were some general problems with the PSP. These problems led him to begin work on an alternative software process improvement method called reflective software engineering. Like the PSP, reflective software engineering is based upon a simple idea: people learn best from their own experience. Reflective software engineering supports experience based improvement in developers' professional activities by helping the developer structure their experience, record it, and analyze it. Unlike the PSP, reflective software engineering is designed around the presence of extensive automated support. The support is provided by a Java based toolkit called “Leap” . The kinds of structured insights and experiences users can record with Leap include: the size of the work product; the time it takes to develop it; the defects that the user or others find in it; the patterns that they discover during the development of it; checklists that they use during or design as a result of the project; estimates for time or size that they generate during the project; and the goals, questions, and measures that the user uses to motivate the data recording

The state of the art in software project estimation does not deserve this reputation, but the fact remains that modern methods are time-consuming and complex. Estimation methods such as COCOMO II [3] are oriented toward the needs of large and very large software engineering projects, and may require time-consuming calibration to fit the peculiarities of an organization, development team, and application domain. On the other hand, methods such as the Personal Software Process [8] have demonstrated good results in improving small/individual project estimation accuracy, but advocates promote the need for specialized training and adherence to a highly constrained approach to development. Although these approaches have demonstrated success in organizations with the resources necessary to adopt them, the process overhead involved in

Project LEAP at the University of Hawaii is investigating tools and methods to support low-cost, empirically based software developer improvement. A recent case study provides evidence that guesstimates, when informed by low-cost analytical methods, might be the most accurate method.

Software developers and managers have faced the problem of producing quality software since the beginning of the computer age. Many people have studied the software quality problem and have proposed many solutions. We can categorize these different solutions into two groups: (1) "Topdown" solutions, that focus on software development as a group effort and (2) "Bottom-up" solutions, that focus on the individual software developer. Some of the many Top-down solutions include: the Capability Maturity Model, Clean Room development, software quality assurance groups, and Formal. Technical Review. These top down methods help improve the quality of the software, however they may not be enough.

The Annotated Egret Navigator (AEN) is a system designed to support strong collaboration among a group as they cooperatively build, review, revise, and improve a structured hypertext document. AEN was used as the central instructional and research system for a graduate seminar on collaborative systems at the University of Hawaii during Fall, 1994. AEN was used for over 285 hours during the second half of the semester alone, and users generated over 800 nodes and 800 links. Lessons learned about strong collaboration include: (1) Users as well as artifacts should be visible; (2) Provide direct and indirect authoring mechanisms; (3) Provide context-sensitive change information; (4) Provide access to intermediate work products; (5) Maintain database integrity; (6) An agent-based architecture may be necessary for systems supporting strong collaboration; and (7) The WWW is not effective for strong collaboration.

Abstract Software developers work too hard and yet do not get enough,done. Developing high quality software efficiently and consistently is a very difficult problem. Developers and managers have tried many,different solutions to address this problem. Recently their focus has shifted from the software organization to the individual software developer. The Personal Software Process incorporates many,of the previous solutions while focusing on the individual software developer. I combined ideas from prior research on the Personal Software Process, Formal Technical Review and my experiences building automated support for software engineering activities to produce the Leap toolkit. The Leap toolkit is intended to help individuals in their efforts to improve their development capabilities. Since it is a light-weight, flexible, powerful, and private tool, it allows individual developers to gain valuable insight into their own development,process. The Leap toolkit also addresses many,measurement,and data issues involved with recording any software development,process. The main thesis of this work is the Leap toolkit provides a more accurate and effective way for developers to collect and analyze their software engineering data than manual,methods. To evaluate this thesis I will investigate three claims: (1) the Leap toolkit prevents many,important errors in data collection and analysis; (2) the Leap toolkit supports data collection and analyses that are not amenable,to manual,enactment; and (3) the Leap toolkit reduces the level of “collection