Browsing by Author "Farghally, Mohammed"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Arguments for and Approaches to Computing Education in Undergraduate Computer Science Programmes
    Cutts, Quintin; Kallia, Maria; Anderson, Ruth; Crick, Tom; Devlin, Marie; Farghally, Mohammed; Mirolo, Claudio; Runde, Ragnhild Kobro; Seppälä, Otto; Urquiza-Fuentes, Jaime; Vahrenhold, Jan (ACM, 2023-12-22)
    Computing education (CE), the scientific foundation of the teaching and learning of subject matter specific to computing, has matured into a field with its own research journals and conferences as well as graduate programmes. Yet, and unlike other mature subfields of computer science (CS), it is rarely taught as part of undergraduate CS programmes. In this report, we present a gap analysis resulting from semi-structured interviews with various types of stakeholders and derive a set of arguments for teaching CE courses in undergraduate CS programmes. This analysis and the arguments highlight a number of opportunities for the discipline of CS at large, in academia, in industry, and in school education, that would be opened up with undergraduate CE courses, as well as potential barriers to implementation that will need to be overcome. We also report on the results of a Delphi process performed to elicit topics for such a course with various audiences in mind. The Delphi process yielded 19 high-level categories that encompass the subject matter CE courses should incorporate, tailored to the specific needs of their intended student audiences. This outcome underscores the extensive range of content that can be integrated into a comprehensive CE programme. Based on these two stakeholder interactions as well as a systematic literature review aiming to explore the current practices in teaching CE to undergraduate students, we develop two prototypical outlines of such a course, keeping in mind that departments may have different preferences and affordances resulting in different kinds of CE offerings. Overall, input from external stakeholders underscores the clear significance of undergraduate CE courses. We anticipate leveraging this valuable feedback to actively promote these courses on a broader scale.
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    Considering Computing Education in Undergraduate Computer Science Programmes
    Cutts, Quintin; Kallia, Maria; Anderson, Ruth; Crick, Tom; Devlin, Marie; Farghally, Mohammed; Mirolo, Claudio; Runde, Ragnhild; Seppälä, Otto; Urquiza-Fuentes, Jaime; Vahrenhold, Jan (ACM, 2023)
    This working group concerns the adoption of computing education (CE) in undergraduate computer science (CS) programmes. Such adoption requires both arguments sufficient to persuade our departmental colleagues and our education committees, and also curricular outlines to assist our colleagues in delivery. The goal of the group is to develop examples of both arguments and curricular outlines, drawing on any prior experience available.
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    IDEAL Pages
    Farghally, Mohammed; Elbery, Ahmed (2014-05-10)
    The main goal of this project is to provide a convenient Web enabled interface to a large collection of event-related webpages supporting the two main services of browsing and searching. We first studied the events and decided what fields are required to build the events index based on the dataset available to us. We then configured a SolrCloud with a collection based on these fields in the Schema.xml file. Then we built a Hadoop Map-Reduce function along with SolrCloud to index documents related to the data about 60 events crawled from the Web. Then we were able to find a way to interface with the Solr server and indexed documents through a PHP server application. Finally, we were able to design a convenient user interface that allows users to browse the documents by event category and event name as well as to search the document collection for particular keywords.
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    Instructors' Perspectives on Capstone Courses in Computing Fields: A Mixed-Methods Study
    Hooshangi, Sara; Shakil, Asma; Dasgupta, Subhasish; Davis, Karen C.; Farghally, Mohammed; Fitzpatrick, KellyAnn; Gutica, Mirela; Hardt, Ryan; Riddle, Steve; Seyam, Mohammed (ACM, 2025-01-22)
    Team-based capstone courses are integral to many undergraduate and postgraduate degree programs in the computing field. They are designed to help students gain hands-on experience and practice professional skills such as communication, teamwork, and selfreflection as they transition into the real world. Prior research on capstone courses has focused primarily on the experiences of students. The perspectives of instructors who teach capstone courses have not been explored comprehensively. However, an instructor’s experience, motivation, and expectancy can have a significant impact on the quality of a capstone course. In this working group, we used a mixed methods approach to understand the experiences of capstone instructors. Issues such as class size, industry partnerships, managing student conflicts, and factors influencing instructor motivation were examined using a quantitative survey and semistructured interviews with capstone teaching staff from multiple institutions across different continents. Our findings show that there are more similarities than differences across various capstone course structures. Similarities include team size, team formation methodologies, duration of the capstone course, and project sourcing. Differences in capstone courses include class sizes and institutional support. Some instructors felt that capstone courses require more time and effort than regular lecture-based courses. These instructors cited that the additional time and effort is related to class size and liaising with external stakeholders, including industry partners. Some instructors felt that their contributions were not recognized enough by the leadership at their institutions. Others acknowledged institutional support and the value that the capstone brought to their department. Overall, we found that capstone instructors were highly intrinsically motivated and enjoyed teaching the capstone course. Most of them agree that the course contributes to their professional development. The majority of the instructors reported positive experiences working with external partners and did not report any issues with Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) or disputes about Intellectual Property (IP). In most institutions, students own the IP of their work, and clients understand that. We use the global perspective that this work has given us to provide guidelines for institutions to better support capstone instructors.
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    An Interactive Visual Presentation of Core Database Design Concepts
    Abdelaziz, Noha; Farghally, Mohammed; Mohammed, Mostafa; Soliman, Taysir (ACM, 2024-12-05)
    Database design is a core topic in Computer Science (CS) curricula at the university level. Students often encounter difficulties and misconceptions while learning these concepts. Previous research attempted to address these learning difficulties through interactive visual demonstrations. However, most of these resources are not well integrated into the curriculum, and lack a proper educational evaluation. In this paper, we present a set of online interactive visualizations that we name DataBase Visualizations (DBVs), that address common database design learning difficulties in an introductory undergraduate database course. Core database design concepts are visualized step-by-step, facilitating a deep understanding of relationship establishment and mapping onto a relational schema. DBVs could be easily embedded in an online eTextbook facilitating integration with the existing curriculum. We present our findings from an evaluation study of the effectiveness of DBVs when applied to a semester-long undergraduate database course in a large public institution in the middle east. Results indicate that intervention group students had significantly higher scores on a post-test offered as part of the final compared to control group students using primarily traditional textual content. Furthermore, intervention group students were surveyed at the end of the semester asking them about the value of DBVs to their learning process and suggestions for improvement. Survey results indicate that DBVs were clear, engaging, and easy to use. We believe that DBVs will be helpful to undergraduate database instructors in their teaching of basic database design concepts.
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    Towards Establishing a Training Program to Support Future CS Teaching-focused Faculty
    Farghally, Mohammed; Seyam, Mohammed; Shaffer, Clifford A. (ACM, 2024-03-07)
    Computer Science programs have seen high enrollments in recent years, which contributed to widening the capacity gap. One way to address this problem is to hire more teaching-focused faculty at both research and non-doctoral granting institutions. Although this kind of hiring has already been taking place in several institutions, PhD-granting CS departments have not been able to produce enough PhDs to meet the increasing demand, especially for PhD holders with interest in - and capacity for - teaching. In this paper, we describe our experience with the initial phase of building a training program within our (large, land grant, R1) institution, targeting graduate students interested in pursuing an academic teachingfocused career in CS. Through a semester-long set of meetings, conversations, and activities, we worked with participants on improving their teaching skills and applying effective pedagogies in the classroom. At the end of the semester, we surveyed participants about the value of those meetings to them, ideas for improvement, and perspectives for future directions. Most participants rated the meetings positively in terms of content relevance and usefulness, and the opportunity to connect and interact with other participants and invited faculty members. We also discuss the lessons learned and best practices, which can be widely applied by other departments looking to better prepare their graduate students for a CS teaching-focused faculty position.