Ingraham honored for contributing outstanding intro computer science curricula
calendar icon11 Oct 2018
Lincoln, Neb.—School of Art, Art History & Design Professor Emeritus of Art Liz Ingraham, along with her colleagues Professor of Computer Science Leen-Kiat Soh and Lee Dee Miller (B.S. 2003; M.S. 2007; Ph.D. 2014), have been awarded an “Honorable Mention” in the 2018 National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Engagement Excellence Awards.
“Our team is thrilled to have this recognition for our Computational Creativity exercise, which is just one of a suite of exercises that are based on principled, thoughtful designs, revised numerous times after actual classroom deployments, and have been shown to improve learning and performance in computing,” Ingraham said. “It’s great to have our hard work acknowledged.”
They received the honor for their assignment, “Computational Creativity Exercise (CCE): Storytelling.” This national award, sponsored by NCWIT and funded by Google, recognizes authors of the best materials submitted to the EngageCSEdu collection in the past year. Two awards and two honorable mentions were made.
EngageCSEdu is a platform of peer-reviewed materials for introductory computer science authored by faculty from across the nation. The goal of the collection is to improve the pedagogy and curriculum of those crucial introductory courses, and in doing so, help retain women and other underrepresented groups in computing.
“I am especially gratified by this award because I know that these exercises benefit students by helping them to become more effective problem solvers in any discipline, and this in turn helps them be more competitive in today’s workplace,” Ingraham said. “Students can experience the benefits of these exercises themselves, as they form the core of an online course, Computational Creativity [https://go.unl.edu/zzvf], here at Nebraska.”
Ingraham is part of an interdisciplinary faculty team, led by Soh, who is the principal investigator on a nearly $900,000 National Science Foundation grant that is looking at ways to deploy these exercises in a more comprehensive study of integrating computational thinking and creative thinking. It’s the third grant Soh has received that is related to computer science education research.