What Exactly is a Laboratory in Computer Science?
Conference: IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference 2023 (EDUCON)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON54358.2023.10125259
The term ‘laboratory‘ is well understood in engineering. However, computer science is a special case here. Historically, computer science is a mixture between the mathematical tradition, the scientific tradition, and the engineering tradition (see [1]). This makes the term ‘laboratory’ harder to define for computer science.
To define the term ‘laboratory’ for computer science, Marcus Soll (NORDAKADEMIE) conducted a large-scale literature research including 83 Papers from ACM and IEEE. The resulting evaluation showed that laboratories are mostly described in a teaching context, however about half of the laboratories used for teaching lack a didactical concept. The topics of laboratories described in literature range widely from traditional topics such as programming to non-traditional topics such as an e-government lab.
The research was part of the project Flexibel kombinierbare Cross-Reality Labore in der Hochschullehre: zukunftsfähige Kompetenzentwicklung für ein Lernen und Arbeiten 4.0 (CrossLab), which is funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre, Germany.
M. Tedre and E. Sutinen, “Three traditions of computing: what educators should know,” Computer Science Education, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 153–170, 2008. ↩︎
bibtex
@inproceedings{2023-What_Exactly_is_a_Laboratory_in_Computer_Science,
title = "What Exactly is a Laboratory in Computer Science?",
author = "Soll, Marcus",
ISSN = "2165-9567",
abstract = "This work presents a large scale literature review on the question of what a laboratory in computer science is. This question arises since computer science has different traditions and is thus harder to grasp compared to more traditional fields of study. A total of 83 papers from the IEEE and ACM digital libraries were inductively categorised. All reviewed papers were published between the years 2017 and 2021. The results show that most laboratories are described in the context of teaching (course development and broader education / laboratory pedagogy research). One big problem in current laboratories seems to be that most are described without any didactical concepts, and the didactical concepts described by the included papers cover a wide range of principles. The disciplines of the reviewed laboratories are highly diverse and span across a wide spectrum with most papers either focussing on programming / software development or do not have a specific laboratory description.",
booktitle = "2023 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)",
doi = "10.1109/EDUCON54358.2023.10125259",
pages = "1-9",
year = 2023,
}
