[opeverkosto] Koli Calling: Call for Tools

Colleagues,

We invite you to submit a tool or system for computing education to
the 2009 Koli Calling conference Tools Workshop. Further details and
submission instructions are available from the conference web site
(http://cs.joensuu.fi/kolistelut/).

Please, feel free to forward this information to colleagues and
relevant mailing lists.

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9th KOLI CALLING INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTING EDUCATION RESEARCH
October 29 - November 1, 2009

Call for tools

A major part of computing education research deals with developing
various kinds of software tools to assist students' and/or teachers'
work. Such tools include, for example, automatic assessment,
visualization, simulation and course management tools, as well as
dedicated learning environments or learning objects. Typical research
papers related to this software include system papers, in which the
rationale for the new tool is described in addition to presenting its
functionality, and evaluation papers, where the focus is on
evaluating the impact of the tool on students' learning process,
learning outcomes or teacher's work. Many papers include both of
these elements, though.

In many cases developing this kind of software requires a major
effort from the researcher(s) and may take from several months to
several years or full time work. Unfortunately, this work is rarely
given proper credit in scientific evaluations as typically research
papers are considered the only important merit. This practice can
well be supported by a claim that from the research point of view,
the software is only a tool required to carry out the experiment, or
test the feasibility of the novel idea - in a similar way as physical
gadgets are needed in experimental physics research.

A significant drawback of this state of affairs is that there is not
much incentive for developing the software to match something more
than the needs of the developer's course / class / institute. When
the initial contribution has been published in papers, it is quite
difficult to get credit for further development work like improving
usability, generalizing the available features to allow easier
adoption of the tool, writing high quality tutorials and manuals, and
extending the tool to cover new topics. Consequently very few tools
have achieved a wide international dissemination - most are used only
in their developers' home institutes or have been forgotten totally
when the initial author has left the institute, and maintenance is no
longer available.

We argue that a new procedure is needed to evaluate the quality of
software tools to give them proper scientific credit. With a rigorous
evaluation process high quality educational software should gain a
merit comparable to research papers. Moreover, such software has much
better chances for wider dissemination, which would be beneficial for
the whole CS education field.

With this rationale, we present a CALL FOR TOOLS for computing
education. This 2nd workshop on computing education tools will be
organized as a part of the Koli Calling 2009 conference. The workshop
will include presentations of accepted tools, discussions on relevant
directions of future tools research and appropriate actions to
promote research, development, and dissemination of educational tools
software for computing education. Last year, the 1st workshop
accepted 4 out of the 7 submissions having 57% acceptance rate (see
http://cs.joensuu.fi/kolistelut/tools/ for more information about the
accepted tools).

Original submissions in all areas related computing education are
welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Programming support tools
* Visualization tools
* Simulation tools
* Automatic analysis / assessment tools
* Course management tools
* Learning environments

Submissions should be an original new tool for some purpose, or a new
version of an existing tool with a clearly identifiable new
contribution. The submission should include

1. A short paper (2-4 pages in ACM double column format) that
summarizes the rationale of the tool
* What is the problem in CS education the tool addresses and how
does it address it?
* What are the arguments / evidence that the tool works
effectively to meet this aim?
* In which way does the tool differ from other tools solving the
same or similar problem? What are the key contributions of the tool?
* Summary of possible publications about the tool and its
evaluation results.

2. Instructions to access a web site that includes
* A tutorial or guided tour of using the tool
* Relevant documentation of the tool
* Tool itself
* Source code of the tool (if appropriate) and instructions to
install the tool on a new platform
* Any other relevant resources

The submissions will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

* Originality compared to previously published tools
* Argumentation and evidence to support the claimed contribution
* Generality to address the task the tool handles
* Usability
* Documentation quality
* Software quality
* Maintenance support
* Possible additional resources

Note that a contribution cannot be based on unpublished or
proprietary code that is inaccessible. Building the contribution on
a commercially available resource is not an obstacle, however, as the
main criteria is accessibility. Yet, for the evaluation process,
access to all relevant resources should be free. In addition, the
libraries and other resources needed to develop the system further
must be obtainable for all researchers.

Koli Calling Educational Tool Award

The workshop program committee will select a tool to receive the Koli
Calling Educational Tool Award at the conference. Last year this was
awarded to PatternCoder submitted by James Paterson, John Haddow, and
Ka Fai Cheng.

Important dates

Submissions due, June 8th 2009
Notification of acceptance, August 10th
Early Reagistration deadline September 18th
Registration deadline, October 2nd
Workshop, October 29th (evening) - November 1st (lunch-time)

The accepted tool papers will be published in the proceedings of the
Koli Calling conference after the conference.

Tools Workshop Reviewers

Moti Ben-Ari, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Pierluigi Crescenzi, University of Florence, Italy
Mike Joy, University of Warwick, UK
Ari Korhonen, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Mikko-Jussi Laakso, University of Turku, Finland
Raymond Lister, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Lauri Malmi, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Arnold Pears, Uppsala University, Sweden
Guido Roessling, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany
Tapio Salakoski, University of Turku, Finland
Simon, University of Newcastle, Australia

MORE INFORMATION

See conference web site http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/kolistelut/ or
workshop website http://cs.joensuu.fi/kolistelut/tools/ or contact
Ari Korhonen <archie_at_cs.hut.fi> for more information.

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Sincerely,
Ari Korhonen, Tools Workshop Chairs

-- 
Ari archie Korhonen (Email: Ari.Korhonen_at_hut.fi)
Tel: +358-44-519 6948 (mobile); +358-9-451 3387 (work)
http://www.hut.fi/u/archie/