Welcome to the TRAILS Lab
We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn computing in a way that motivates them and supports their needs. We use approaches from human-computer interaction and computing education to understand learners’ goals and experiences, build educational interventions inspired by learning theory, and evaluate the effectiveness of these new approaches.
We want all computing learners to achieve their goals (and perhaps aim for goals they previously thought impossible). We respect that different learners want to reach different endpoints with their computing knowledge, and meeting the needs of all learners will require deeply understanding the learning process and building a variety of pathways to computing education.
News
16 January 2025
Yoshee and Arif’s paper that designed an approach to support computing instructors in domain-specific programming plan identification has been (conditionally) accepted to CHI 2025! Preprint here.
06 December 2024
We are organizing two online panels at SIGCSE Virtual 2024 on Dec 7th! Jina is moderating Assessments for Non-CS Major Computing Classes at 7pm GMT, and Arif is moderating Challenges and Solutions for Teaching Decomposition and Planning Skills in CS1 at 8.30pm GMT.
13 August 2024
Katie, Jina, and Arif are attending ICER 2024 in Melbourne, Australia! Jina and Arif present on Wednesday after lunch.
14 July 2024
Katie and Arif are attending EDM 2024/L@S 2024 in Atlanta, GA! Arif is presenting on Wednesday (1.30pm). You can also read the blog post here and check the video here.
05 June 2024
Jina’s paper exploring conversational programmer and end-user programmer learning goals and attitudes was accepted at ICER 2024!
05 June 2024
Arif’s paper investigating the cognitive validity of CS1 programming plans using learning curve analysis was accepted at ICER 2024!
01 May 2024
Yoshee won a grant from the Honors College to perform research on supporting domain-specific programming plan identification!
12 April 2024
Arif’s paper replicating learning curve analysis with syntax-based concepts (with surprising results) was accepted at EDM 2024!
