Cedr | Swaroop Joshi

Digital Conscience: Investigating the State of Ethics in CS Curricula in India

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Teaching Digital Accessibility through Serious Games

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 12:45:18 +0530

Background

The estimates that more than a billion people live with some form of disability. The mandates countries to “… promote the design, development, production, and distribution of accessible information and communications technologies and systems…”. To accomplish this, concepts and skills needed to develop accessible products and services must be included in computing education. Software companies like , , , and emphasize making their products accessible, and accessibility often features as a preferred skill in their job postings. For instance, a current for a Software Engineer position specifies “Experience developing accessible technologies” as a preferred qualification.

The Problem

Despite such increasing awareness in the software industry about accessibility in the recent years, many . Software professionals point to for this gap in implementing accessibility.

According to the , the main barriers to teaching accessibility include the lack of clear learning objectives about accessibility and their lack of knowledge about accessibility. Also, most instructors who teach accessibility have a background in human-computer interaction (HCI) and related fields and teach these topics in specialized courses. This indicates that other instructors may find it challenging to build their expertise and to incorporate accessibility topics in “mainstream” CS courses.

Our Contribution

We have developed fun, self-paced learning interventions, in the form of three sets of games:

Accessibility Awareness: (a) a special version of Wordle that asks you to guess a five-letter word, and tells you how it relates to accessibility, and (b) a game that asks you to burst the bubbles that carry a myth about accessibility, while saving the ones that carry a fact.
Access Quest: A role playing game that helps you learn WCAG guidelines about accessibility by solving puzzles and challenges a software developer may face in a day-to-day life.
Bug Hunter: A race against time game with a goal to find as many accessibility bugs in a web page as possible. The game is designed to assess your knowledge of WCAG guidelines.

You can try out these games at

We welcome your feedback and suggestion.

This project is supported by the

and BITS Pilani Research Initiation Grant.

Approaching me for research projects

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:50:42 +0530

A list of

working in my research group.

Hello students!

Approaching faculty to find appropriate research projects is essential to your academic life. This post provides some valuable tips for making communication easy and efficient for both of us. I will update it occasionally by adding new projects, removing old ones, and modifying some details.

Please read carefully before approaching me.

First, I work in (computing) education research, an emerging, interdisciplinary field, with applications of the core CS concepts (like programming language design, natural language processing, etc.) to human-computer interaction, learning theories, and behavioral studies. Make sure you really want to work in this field before approaching me. (Of course, if you are simply curious about this field and my interests, don’t hesitate to ask questions.)
Prerequisites:
- Foremost ones are being proactive, punctual, and having good communication skills¹.
- Basic statistics is required (can be a co-requisite²); inferential statistics is desired.
- For certain projects, mastery in basic CS concepts (software engineering, object-oriented programming, data structures and algorithms) is essential.
- Having prior teaching or research experience is desired but not required.

How to contact me

Read through the descriptions of my .
Email me your resume, the title of the project you want to work on, and a 300-500 word description of why you want to work on that project.
Include any relevant information, like teaching or research experience.
Mention (a) at least one book³ you have read in the past year, or (b) if you haven’t read a good book in the past year, your all-time favorite book, or (c) if you don’t have a favorite book, your favorite movie or TV show.

Note

If your initial email does not demonstrate that you have read this page, you will not get a response.

Prospective Ph.D. students

There are exciting research questions at the intersection of computing education and accessibility.

I look forward to working with part-time or full-time Ph.D. students to explore those questions.

Interested students should note some important points:

Familiarize yourself with the BITS Pilani . Admissions happen through the BITS process; interest from a faculty does not guarantee admission.
Please let me know if you are looking for a full-time Ph.D. position or part-time. Full-time students stay on/near the campus and attend classes/meetings regularly. Part-time students typically fulfill the requirements remotely while working in the industry or academia; part-time positions are not advertised every semester.
The second bullet under ‘How to contact me’ above is even more critical for Ph.D. applicants. Besides explaining why this particular project, explain in detail why you want to do a Ph.D. in the first place (what are your career goals, how a Ph.D. in this area will help you achieve those, etc.).

Masters’ degree (HD) students

For the research practice course, I will expect the following deliverables from you (apart from the final evaluation by the institute):

Reading and presenting (to a small group) 2-3 relevant research papers,
Developing an artifact (a piece of software or a document) that reasonably advances the project.

For the thesis or any other course, we will discuss the expectations and deliverables on a case-by-case basis.

I will work with only a limited number of students, so make sure you approach me well in advance (at least two weeks before the relevant deadlines).

Undergraduate (FD) students

If you are interested in doing your project course(s) with me, please be advised that I would like to see your work before formally assigning you to a project. Keep this in mind and approach me early so you can work with me without affecting your coursework and graduation schedule. The expected deliverables are similar to the HD courses listed above.

I expect FD students to work with me for a semester or so, before enrolling for a formal project course.

Good communication skills need not mean speaking or writing English. The vocabulary of a particular language may limit you at first, but if you can communicate well in one language, you can (with some effort) communicate in other languages too. On the other hand, if you cannot communicate in any language, including your mother tongue, it is unlikely you will communicate well in English. ↩︎
I you have not completed the stats courses yet, you can learn the relevant concepts on your own while you work with me. ↩︎
Any language, any genre ↩︎

CPS in Computing Education: Current Trends

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 10:41:18 -0600