Veronica Catete

North Carolina State University | NCSU · Department of Computer Science

With the growing prevalence of AI, the need for K-12 AI education is becoming more crucial, which is prompting active research in developing engaging and age-appropriate AI learning activities. Efforts are underway, such as those by the AI4K12 initiative, to establish guidelines for organizing K- 12 AI education; however, effective instructional re...

Many block-based programming environments have proven to be effective at engaging novices in learning programming. However, most offer only restricted access to the outside world, limiting learners to commands and computing resources built in to the environment. Some allow learners to drag and drop files, connect to sensors and robots locally or is...

Historically, female students have shown low interest in the field of computer science. Previous computer science curricula have failed to address the lack of female-centered computer science activities, such as socially relevant and real-life applications. Our new summer camp curriculum introduces the topics of artificial intelligence (AI), machin...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an urgent need for professional development (PD) experiences to support teacher learning across hybrid and digital contexts. This study investigates teachers' experiences in a Virtual Pivot, a PD workshop designed to support computational thinking integration into disciplinary teaching. Participants were 151 middle and...

We have established a research-practice partnership (RPP) to establish a computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT)-focused STEM ecosystem at two middle schools. The STEM ecosystem model is used as a framework to address systemic barriers to student participation in computing. Creating a school-based CT/CS-focused STEM ecosystem through...

Since the Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) course has been released, it has vastly increased the need for highly trained CSP teachers who are prepared to bring CS to a diverse group of students. We have designed professional development (PD) workshops for high school teachers learning to teach this new CSP course, basing our...

The Covid-19 pandemic has offered new challenges and opportunities for teaching and research. It has forced constraints on in-person gathering of researchers, teachers, and students, and conversely, has also opened doors to creative instructional design. This paper describes a novel approach to designing an online, synchronous teacher professional...

Infusing Computing is a three-year professional development project that supports middle and high school teachers in integrating computational thinking into their disciplinary teaching. During the first two years of the project, 266 teachers (99 individuals, 167 members of school-based teacher teams) attended week-long summer workshops and particip...

STEM ecosystem is an emerging model for identifying the barriers and support structures that students have in their learning trajectories in STEM. In this paper our university-based research team presents a CS/CT-focused STEM ecosystem strategy designed to address underrepresentation in computing fields. We describe our current and future work with...

In this paper, we perform a predictive analysis of a curriculum-integrated math game, ST Math, to suggest a partial ordering for the game's curriculum sequence. We analyzed the sequence of ST Math objectives played by elementary school students in 5 U.S. districts and grouped each objective into difficult and easy categories according to how many r...

As computing skills become necessary for 21st-century students, infused computational thinking (CT) lessons must be created for core courses to truly provide computing education for all. This will bring challenges as students will have widely varying experience and programming ability. Additionally, STEM teachers might have little experience teachi...

Computational Thinking (CT) is being infused into curricula in a variety of core K-12 STEM courses. As these topics are being introduced to students without prior programming experience and are potentially taught by instructors unfamiliar with programming and CT, appropriate lesson design might help support both students and teachers. "Use-Modify-C...

The Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) course has been fully active for 2 years, garnering a large group of diverse students [2], and flaming the need for highly trained CSP teachers, especially in effective practices for diversity and equity. We have conducted summer professional development (PD) workshops from 2012-2018 which...

In summer 2018, we conducted two week-long professional development workshops for 116 middle and high school teachers interested in infusing computational thinking (CT) into their classrooms. Teachers learned to program in Snap!, connect CT to their disciplines, and create infused CT learning segments for their classes. This paper investigates the...

In the domain of programming, a growing number of algorithms automatically generate data-driven, next-step hints that suggest how students should edit their code to resolve errors and make progress. While these hints have the potential to improve learning if done well, few evaluations have directly assessed or compared the quality of different hint...

With the increased demand for introducing computational thinking (CT) in K-12 classrooms, educational researchers are developing integrated lesson plans that can teach CT fundamentals in non-computing specific classrooms. Although these lessons reach more students through the core curriculum, proper evaluation methods are needed to ensure the quali...

We present a new framework describing how teachers use ST Math, a curriculum-integrated, year-long educational game, in 3rd-4th grade classrooms. We combined authentic classroom observations with teacher interviews to identify teacher needs and practices. Our findings extended and contrasted with prior work on teachers' behaviors around classroom g...

Tinkering has been shown to have a positive influence on students in open-ended making activities. Open-ended programming assignments in block-based programming resemble making activities in that both of them encourage students to tinker with tools to create their own solutions to achieve a goal. However, previous studies of tinkering in programmin...

One way to increase access to education on computing is to integrate computational thinking (CT) into K12 disciplinary courses. However, this challenges teachers to both learn CT and decide how to best integrate CT into their classes. In this position paper, we present PRADA, an acronym for Pattern Recognition, Abstraction, Decomposition, and Algor...

The purpose of this session is to describe our implementation of a professional development model designed to support middle and secondary content area teachers in integrating computational thinking into their classrooms. Drawing on findings from our mixed methods analysis of interviews, surveys, and teacher-created products, we argue that the prof...

There is a growing need to present all students with an opportunity to learn computer science and computational thinking (CT) skills during their primary and secondary education. Traditionally, these opportunities are available outside of the core curriculum as stand-alone courses often taken by those with preparatory privilege. Researchers have id...

With increased numbers of K-12 computing courses, we also see an increase in teachers new to the subject, making it difficult for them to properly assess student programming assignments. Many of these teachers require project-specific rubrics to help assess student learning. Researchers have attempted to create systematic, validated, and reliable r...

Growing public demand for computer science (CS) education in K-12 schools requires an increase in well-qualified and well-supported computing teachers. To alleviate the lack of K-12 computing teachers, CS education researchers have focused on hosting professional development workshops to prepare in-service teachers from other disciplines to teach i...

When novice students encounter diculty when learning to program, some can seek help from instructors or teaching assistants. Œis one-on-one tutoring is highly e‚ective at fostering learning, but busy instructors and large class sizes can make expert help a scarce resource. Increasingly, programming environments aŠttempt to imitate this human suppo...

Computer science education in high school is fundamental for increasing the diversity in computing majors at a university level. However, computer science is not often taught in America before university, and usually, the professionals who teach it are not trained experts in computer science concepts and terminology. In this paper, we introduce a n...

The "Beauty and Joy of Computing" Computer Science Principles class has inspired many new teachers to learn to teach creative computing classes in high schools. However, new computer science teachers feel under-prepared to grade open-ended programming assignments and support their students' successful learning. Rubrics have widely been used to help...

Computer Science Principles (CSP) will become an Advanced Placement course during the 2016-17 school year, and there is an immediate need to train new teachers to be leaders in computing classrooms. From 2012-2015, the Beauty and Joy of Computing team offered professional development (PD) to 133 teachers, resulting in 89 BJC CSP courses taught in h...

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a curriculum for the new AP Computer Science Principles course. Over the past 2 years, we have collected post-course surveys from 399 students participating in the BJC course. This paper investigates how the responses of females and students from underrepresented racial minority groups (URMs) differed from t...

Students often take computing classes because they are eager to create games, to learn to create meaningful and useful software, or both. Connecting computing to real, cutting-edge applications has been shown to increase engagement of women and minorities. The new CS Principles curriculum, a pilot Advanced Placement course, seeks to broaden the par...

In the field of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, data-driven methods for providing hints and feedback are becoming increasingly popular. One such method, Hint Factory, builds an interaction network out of observed player traces. This data structure is used to select the most appropriate next step from any previously observed state, which can then be u...

Researchers in CS have heard of disparities between underrepresented groups and the lack of people to ll future jobs. Initiatives focus on strengthening the computing pipeline and getting more students interested. This research goes further by analyzing factors that affect behavioral change and get students to enroll in computing courses. We focus...

The new CS Principles curriculum, a pilot Advanced Placement course, offers novice students an exciting opportunity to learn computing in a hands-on, fun way. High school and college teachers of introductory computer science course are invited to this workshop to learn basic game and mobile phone development. Participants will learn GameMaker, AppI...

This design research paper examines the implementation and curriculum changes of an after school computer science program that promotes computational thinking to middle school students. The program, Students in Programming, Robotics, and Computer Science (SPARCS), can adapt to different presentation environments, such as independent after school se...

New conference attendees often lack existing social networks and thus face difficulties in identifying relevant collaborators or in making appropriate connections. As a consequence they often feel disconnected from the research community and do not derive the desired benefits from the conferences that they attend. In this paper we discuss Snag'em,...

Students often take computing classes because they are eager to create games, to learn to create meaningful and useful software, or both. Connecting computing to real, cutting-edge applications has been shown to increase engagement of women and minorities. The new CS Principles curriculum, a pilot Advanced Placement course, seeks to broaden the par...

Social capital implies that social networks have value. It is therefore important that when a person is at an academic conference, they must strive to build a strong professional social network for themselves. This can be difficult for many academic conference attendeees. We present Table Tilt, a two-minute ice-breaker game for 2--6 players with iP...