NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Current Events Articles for Engineering Students Abstract For the past year, a group of students and faculty have been engaging in weekly discussions regarding articles from Tuesday’s Science section of the New York Times. This initiative was started to foster general science and educational literacy among engineering students, as well as to better engage students and faculty in discussions regarding current topics and issues confronting society as a whole. The group meets weekly for a lunch meeting to discuss a subset of the week’s articles. One faculty member is responsible for identifying approximately four articles each week that form the basis for our initial discussion. The specific articles that will be discussed are determined by a vote at the start of the meeting as students get their food and drink. Introduction A group of engineering students and faculty have been engaged in a weekly discussion of articles from the ‘Science’ section of the New York Times. This is facilitated through the New York Times student readership program. The program supplies free copies of the newspaper to students (and faculty) on college campuses. It provides a forum for students and faculty to engage in discussions surrounding the current news, each bringing their own expertise and opinion to the group. The weekly forum, funded by the college of engineering, provides food (pizza) and drink for all interested students and faculty. Students and faculty have a chance to meet informally outside of the classroom environment and discuss current topics that are directly relevant to the fields of science and engineering. Advertisements for the forums are distributed throughout the college, and several upper-division engineering courses require some level of participation. Background The reading group described in this paper is meant to provide an informal forum for students and faculty to discuss contemporary issues. This interaction, and anticipated reduction in communication barriers between faculty and students, is considered to be one of the primary reasons for the existence of this group. At the same time, faculty members and engineering programs can use our reading group to assess ABET criterion 3, outcome j, a knowledge of contemporary issues, by making assignments that involve attending and discussing a news article with the group. The ability to measure this type of knowledge gain is important. In 2007, a study involving a small number of senior students in eight different engineering programs found students to be relatively unaware of contemporary issues in their field and unaware of current global concerns 1. Their ability to communicate and participate in discussion without either dominating or withdrawing was also a problem. Faculty members are addressing measurement of knowledge of contemporary issues in a variety of ways. Two ways for assessing this knowledge involve courses at the freshman level 2, 3 or in senior design 4, 5. Courter and Johnson looked at forty students in a basic communications course that were also part of a first-year interest group (FIG) that involved common linked courses.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Engineering Collaborations with Liberal Arts Abstract Meaningful engagement of engineering students with the liberal arts presents a unique set of challenges. This paper outlines a series of activities designed to foster collaborations between engineering and the liberal arts. Over the last few years, we have been engaged in a number of activities on campus where students and faculty from engineering work side-by-side with students and faculty from the theatre, dance, telecommunications & film, music, and other disciplines. In this paper we describe a set of cooperative activities on our campus, explore the benefits and lessons learned from these activities, examine the resources and relationships required for them to succeed, and provide a model for the institutionalization of these collaborative ventures. Introduction As part of an institution-wide initiative, our College of Engineering has recently seen an increased emphasis on interactions and collaborations with other programs and colleges at the university. The institution is actively promoting a Creative Campus initiative that focuses on the engagement of students in a wide range of activities. Creative Campus is an organization for students, faculty and staff to support the arts and creative activity on campus. These activities are similar to other initiatives and ventures that are taking place across the country. Several institutions1,2 have investigated formal linkages between an engineering degree and the liberal arts, developing a Bachelor of Arts in Engineering. Other initiatives provide course experiences that introduce the field of engineering to non-majors 3,4,5. Still other efforts look at incorporating fundamental issues of other disciplines, such as leadership, into the engineering curriculum 6,7. Finally, several examples exist where interdisciplinary courses are established that bridge engineering with other disciplines 8,9,10. The concept of a tighter integration between engineering and the humanities & fine arts has been around for many years 11. A properly educated engineer should have an understanding of the social sciences and humanities. However, such a viewpoint is not without its critics 12. A curriculum that embeds this linkage into specific course content is one approach 13, but such a model is difficult to implement and has not received much national attention. While not everyone agrees that engineering faculty are resistant to this proposed change 14, there has been little movement nationally with respect to true curricula change. Collaborative Ventures In this section we will briefly overview four collaborations that have taken place on our campus over the past two years. Each of these collaborations was developed independently through conversations between faculty and administrators in the two colleges. The length of engagement for each of these collaborations was approximately one semester in length; two involved upper- division engineering students and two involved freshman engineering students.

learning to program, students are typically exposed to either a visual or command line environment. Visual environments are usually adopted to help engage students with programming due to their user-friendly feature capabilities. This article explores the effect of using visual environments such as Integrated Development Environments and syntax-free tools to teach students how to program. Prior studies have shown that some visual environments can have a productive impact on a student's ability to learn and become engaged with programming. However, the functional behavior of visual environments may cause a student to develop a faulty mental model for programming. One possible reason is due to the fixed set of skills that a student acquires upon initial exposure to programming while using a visual environment. Two systematic studies were conducted for exposing students to programming in introductory courses using both visual and command line environments. From the first study, it was found that visual environments can initially impose a lower learning curve for students. However, the second study revealed that visual environments may present a challenge for students to directly transfer their acquired skills to other programming environments after initial exposure.

Criteria 3 of ABET 2000 includes professional skills that have not traditionally been explicitly taught in undergraduate engineering programs. In addition the criterion related to "modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice" provides for the instruction of a wide range of topics that are useful for the young engineer. Engineering faculty have limited experience and resources on teaching professional skills. Most engineering programs do not have the luxury of adding a professional skills course to their already overcrowded curriculum. Therefore, a suite of modules has been developed for the professional skills of lifelong learning, project management, teaming, and time management. Each module has been designed to fit within three 50-minute class periods in a standard course and includes bridge material to transition back to the original course. Each module was beta-tested by another instructor with a multi-disciplinary group of student evaluators. The beta-testing was done as a highly controlled stand-alone experience instead of part of a regular class. Many of these modules have not yet been used in the traditional classroom. Overall, the students had a positive reaction to each of the modules. Details of each of the modules and specific results of the beta-testing are included in the paper. While the modules are still undergoing improvement, they are at a stage where they can be used by other faculty. Thus, the modules are available at http://ece.ua.edu/faculty/rpimmel/public_html/ec2000-modules.

While the opportunities to create writing-intensive courses in engineering are limited, the need for stronger writing curriculum within engineering courses is great. This need has been shown in studies such as the Engineering Writing Initiative (EWI), which tracked the development of engineering students’ writing skills at the University of Texas at Tyler over a four-year period. In that study, the presenters identified two key deficiencies in engineering students’ written communications: rhetorical skills (awareness of audience, purpose, and message) and visual communications (graphs, figures, etc.). The work begun by EWI continues with The Coach, a collaborative, NSF-funded project at three institutions: the University of Alabama (UA); the University of Texas at Tyler (UTTyler), a state-supported regional university and a component of the University of Texas System; and Bevill State Community College (BSCC), a state-supported community college in Alabama. The Coach is developing a series of web-based writing instruction modules and will help students learn to write for audiences of engineers through sequences of writing samples, prompts, and heuristics. By emphasizing writing as a design process, The Coach is intended to provide engineering faculty with a valuable resource for developing students’ rhetorical skills. The Coach’s development is founded upon the understanding engineering curricula are the most-appropriate venue for building stronger engineering writing skills. Technical issues prevented the planned launch of The Coach in 2011, but roll-out took place on all three campuses in fall, 2012. This paper describes in detail the state of development, curricular introduction, and preliminary assessment of The Coach. Implementation of The Coach is ongoing in spring 2013, and a summary and final evaluation of The Coach will follow once all data have been collected. Preliminary results show a measurable improvement in the quality of engineering writing through use of The Coach; however, this conclusion must be embraced with reservation until further data analysis has been completed.

“The Coach” is a web-based tool developed to guide students through the technical writing process. It provides instruction about form as well as critique of different aspects of the students’ writing. It goes beyond the Microsoft word spell check and grammar check. It gives feedback about writing complexity and appropriateness for different word choices in a technical document. It also gives background about the appropriate contents for technical writing in addition to example documents. The latter is extremely important for the novice writer who may not have much experience in working with technical reports. The initial document type in “The Coach” is a lab report. If the lab report can be developed into the web-based tool, other forms will be more easily implemented. In addition to developing the website, the development team is preparing a document and a video for a professor to use to instruct students on the use of “The Coach.” The instructional materials and “The Coach” were beta tested with a freshman engineering class. A baseline writing sample was collected before the introduction of “The Coach.” Students in some sections were instructed in use of “The Coach,” and other sections were controls. Additional beta testing is ongoing.

Improving the novice's experience with learning to program has been an important research topic for some time. Appropriate programming environments for novices have been one research area. For example, many departments have adopted visual environments to teach programming as opposed to a command line environment at the beginning stages of a CS curriculum. The features in standard command line environments are not as assistive to programmers as visual environments. Novices must learn both language syntax and semantics while navigating the file system and compilation tools. On the other hand, visual environments can enable novices to conduct the same behavior with one or more button clicks. However, the consistency and affordance of certain features in visual environments could cause novices to develop a false perception of programming. In addition, such features may impose the inability for novices to immediately adapt to less assistive environments. In contrast, command line environments may enable novices to develop better mental models for programming because of their limited features, which could also allow them to transition to other environments much easier. A protocol analysis was conducted on seven students from a CS1 course who learned Python using either IDLE or VIM. The objective was to record and analyze each student's behavior while they use the opposing environment to write a program. This study showed that students who originally used IDLE were not as equipped for transitioning to VIM as their counterparts who transitioned to IDLE.

Improving the novice's experience with learning to program has been an important research topic for some time. Appropriate programming environments for novices have been one research area. For example, many departments have adopted visual environments to teach programming as opposed to a command line environment at the beginning stages of a CS curriculum. Standard command line environments tend to possess less assistive features for programming than visual environments. In contrast, highly assistive visual environments could constrict a novice to learn a fixed set of foundational programming skills that exclude exposure to syntax checking, compilation and file systems. Therefore, novices may need to move to a less assistive environment to round out their skill set. A study was conducted in a CS1-laboratory class by examining three Python programming environments with varying levels of feature assistance (IDLE, PyScripter and Notepad). This study showed that students struggled with using a low assistive environment regardless of their prior experience and confidence with programming. Students were able to use moderately assistive environments more effectively.

Determining appropriate practices for novice programming has been an important research topic for some time. Programming tools and their effect on novices has been one research area. When learning to program, novices can be exposed to either visual or command line tools. The variation of feature sets between both tool schemes could influence how a novice perceives programming. Visual tools tend to possess features that are familiar, assistive, and user-friendly for novices. Command line tools, on the other hand, usually provide basic essential features for programming. Prior studies have shown the effects of programming tools on novices while learning to program. However, most of these studies primarily focus on visual tools. This article explores visual and command line programming and their effect on novices. Our findings show that visual tools could provide a lower learning curve for novices, while command line tools could broaden their understanding of programming.

Improving the novice's experience with programming has been an important research topic for some time. The high attrition rate of CS majors continues to be a problem. Incoming majors are being exposed to programming but many are driven away from the field. As a way to engage novices with programming, many CS departments have adopted visual environments. However, not all novices are taught to program using visual environments. Typically, students are introduced to programming through either a visual or command line environment at the beginning stages of a CS curriculum. The features in standard command line environments are not as assistive to programmers as visual environments. Novices must learn both language syntax and semantics while navigating the file system and compilation tools. On the other hand, visual environments with highly assistive features could constrict a novice to learn a fixed set of foundational programming skills that exclude exposure to syntax checking, compilation and file systems. Novices will eventually need to move to a less assistive environment to round out their skill set. The objective of this research was to determine if certain environments are more appropriate for teaching novices how to program, based on their respective levels of feature assistance. There are anecdotally based motivations for using either tools with low assistive features like command line environments (promotes acquisition of useful mental models) or tools with moderate to high assistive features like visual environments (engages novices while programming). Unfortunately, no systematic study exists that supports either supposition. This research was composed of three studies for evaluating environments with varying feature sets: a high school outreach, a CS1-Laboratory Study, and a CS1-Study. Engagement, comprehension, efficiency, and usability were used as measures to evaluate the environments during these studies. Overall, this research showed that a moderately assistive environment imposes a lower learning curve for novices, while a low assistive environment appears to broaden their understanding of programming.

Persistence of first-year students in computer science is a problem. Although there are many factors that determine whether a student can be successful in computer science, research has shown that some attrition is due to personal perception of their ability in computer science. We created a learning experience specifically designed to improve students' self-assessment of their abilities. "Providing robotic experiences through objectbased programming" (PREOP) is a GUI programming environment based on Alice that students use to program autonomous robot controllers. Results show that for students that rate themselves as average programmers, the modules designed around PREOP positively affect the students' intimidation levels.

Improving the novice's experience with programming may be key to retaining more students interested in Computer Science. Programming environments is an area that lacks comprehensive study. Some entry-level sequences prefer visual environments while others tout the benefits of command line environments. In either case, there is little more than anecdotal evidence to support either choice. We present a novel categorization of programming tools based on assistive features that predict the usefulness of programming environments for novices. This categorization is supported by a controlled study that measured the differences in engagement, efficiency, comprehension, and usability. We found that the extremes of assistive features are problematic regardless of prior programming experience.

We examine principles and approaches for proactive computer-system forensics. Proactive computer-system forensics is the design, construction and configuring of systems to make them most amenable to digital forensics analyses in the future. The primary goals of proactive computer-system forensics are system structuring and augmentation for automated data discovery, lead formation, and efficient data preservation. We propose: (1) using the Neyman-Pearson Lemma to proactively build online forensics tests with the best possible critical regions for hypothesis testing, and (2) using classical stopping rules for sequential hypothesis testing to determine which users are deviating from standard usage behavior and should be the focus of more investigative resources. Here the focus is on security breaches by the employees or stakeholders of an organization. The main measurements are event-driven logs of program executions.

The decline in the number of women in computing disciplines has been attributed to different causes, and research on the decline continues to grow. While there are numerous reasons suggested for the imbalance in these disciplines, the perceptions that women hold about their computing capabilities continue to be of interest. The current study investigates how a vicarious learning experience can be used to influence computer selfefficacy. To implement the vicarious experience, a computer-assisted peer-modeling instruction aide was developed. The study reveals that vicarious learning has a significant impact on female and male computer selfefficacy, and that the impact may be more significant for females.

Technology is an integral part of everyday life. At home, at school, and at work, people use computers. Consequently, there is an increased demand for people to possess computer skills. However, studies show that fewer women are earning degrees and are receiving training in technology-related disciplines than they did twenty years ago. Hence, research exploring the “gender gap” has grown significantly and continues to grow. While there are many suggested reasons for gender differences in technology, the perceptions that women hold about their computing capabilities continue to be of interest and provide the impetus for the current research. Self-efficacy has been used by information technology researchers to explore computer usage and adoption and has been found to be an important factor in the decision to use computers. The current study investigates this construct and how one of the sources that influences it, vicarious experiences, can be used to impact computer usage and behavior. More specifically, it investigates how a vicarious learning experience can be used to increase females' computer self-efficacy levels and influence their attitudes towards computing. To implement the vicarious learning experience, a computer assisted peer-modeling software application was developed. The study revealed that vicarious learning has a significant impact on both female and male computer self-efficacy and computing performance level. The study suggests that the role that a vicarious learning experience plays may be more significant on female computer self-efficacy than on male computer self-efficacy and that understanding this impact may help lessen the gender gap.

This study proposes the use of an artificial neural network algorithm to perform passphrase authentication based on the typing style of a user. The only hardware required is a keyboard. Prior studies have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach and its limitations, one of which was the need for collection of impostor samples for training the artificial neural network based classifier algorithm. This requirement is rather impractical for most application domains. The proposed study eliminates the need to collect impostor samples by employing an unsupervised and self-organizing artificial neural network algorithm, the Adaptive Resonance Theory 2 neural network, and therefore pushes the passphrase authentication technology one step closer to the realm of practical implementation. The preliminary study performed demonstrates that it is possible to train an Adaptive Resonance Theory 2 neural network using only authentic sample data and still provide a relatively low impostor pass rate. Given the minimal cost and easy in-field trainability of the proposed passphrase authentication system, the developed system can greatly enhance the security of computing environments with wide acceptance.

This paper outlines an ongoing study investigating the maintenance of literate programs. The study examines the accuracy and performance time of subjects performing maintenance task on 4 different literate programs of varying size. The preliminary data suggest that subject performance is not directly related to program size.

A method for user authentication is presented which analyzes keystroking data as the user types his or her name. This study utilizes the ADALINE (ADAptive LINear Element) and backpropagation neural nets to identify the typing pattern characteristic of a particular user. A simple measure of geometric distance is also used for comparison. This paper provides a brief introduction to this type of neural net. It then describes the research procedure and contrasts the initial and new results, followed by a conclusion with notes concerning future research. For an average 15-character name, a complete exclusion of imposters is obtained from a set of over 5000 imposter samples

A method for identifying computer users by analysing keystroking patterns with neural networks and a simple geometric distance is presented. A model of each user's normal typing style was created and compared with later typing samples. Preliminary results demonstrate complete exclusion of imposters and a reasonably low false alarm rate when the sample text was limited to the user's name.