Projects
Opportunities for Students
I sometimes have opportunities for students to work on projects with me, but when I do I advertise broadly. Keep an eye on the CSE mailing list for these opportunities. You're welcome to contact me to talk more about my work at any time, though.
Active Projects
Transfer Student Pathways and Support
As of late 2022/early 2023 I am starting a new project looking into the CSE transfer student experience. Projects in this area might involve any of the following:
Mapping and visualizing CS transfer pathways across higher education institutions in the state of California. I would like to better understand all of the different pathways that exist from the 116 Community Colleges to the 23 Cal States and 9 UC Schools across California. This project will involve web searching and scraping and building visualization and analysis techniques and tools.
Investigating where transfer students thrive and struggle when transferring to UC San Diego CSE. This work could involve quantitative data analysis and visualization as well as potentially interviews and surveys.
Designing support programs and community building structures for transfer students. This project will develop based on the results of the above work.
In Spring 2014 I launched a project to get early-career undergraduates engaged in ongoing research in computer science. Work on this project typically involves collecting or analyzing data from past participants from the prorgam. You can find out more about the project by clicking on the link above.
CS Education Studies
I am actively conducting educational and pedagogy research in the classroom at UC San Diego. For more information about that ongoing work, please see the CS Education Research group page.
Older (inactive) Projects
CS for All
My colleagues and I at Harvey Mudd College developed a breadth-first introductory computer science course designed for all students. The goal of this course is to expose students to the true nature of computer science, including several styles of programming and computational thinking, some of the core challenges and ideas in computer science, and some of computer science's influences on other disciplines. More information about this course, including instructor resources and a draft of our textbook, can be found on the following page:
Modular CS1 from the Inside Out
There is also a print textbook available.
Women in Computing at Harvey Mudd College
During my time at HMC I helped increase the percentage of women in the computer science major from around 12% in 2005 and before to around 35-40% and then to its current 50%.
At HMC we made three changes to our program that led to the increase in women in our major:
The new introductory courses, described above;
Trips for first-year women students to the Grace Hopper Celebration Women in Computing; and
Research experiences for women students after their first year.
These changes are described in more detail in the paper Women in CS: An Evaluation of Three Promising Practices. Christine Alvarado and Zachary Dodds. In Proceedings of SIGCSE 2010. March 10–13, 2010, Milwaukee, Wisconsin as well as in a forthcoming paper in ACM Inroads, to be published in late 2012.
If you prefer to see a talk on these changes, you can watch the Google Tech Talk I gave in 2011:
For more information about the trips for first-year students to GHC, including logistics that might help you offer these trips to your students, please see my Trips to Grace Hopper page.
In addition to the above efforts, I am on the Advisory Board of the National Center for Women & IT's Academic Alliance and I am the faculty adviser for the UCSD Women in Computing (WIC) group.
Pen-Based Interfaces
The video below showcases a sketch-based tool for creating digital logic circuits that my students and I have developed while I was at Harvey Mudd College. The software as well as many more details of the project and other downloads are all available on the LogiSketch project page or try the newer version of this page.
Older Sketch Recognition Work
I did my doctoral work as part of the Design Rationale Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT.
My PhD research was involved in building a sketch recognition system that combines shape and contextual information in a given domain to provide robust recognition within that domain. this recognition engine enables the construction of a fundamentally new kind of interface which we call SkRUIs (sketch recognition user interfaces). I have begun to explore the human computer interaction challenges in developing SkRUIs for larger systems that involve diagram creation as one component of their interface.
I previously worked on creating a sketch-based interface for mechanical engineers. My master's thesis is a sketching program which recognizes simple mechanical sketches. I explored how to build a system which would work with the user to provide an interface which is both intuitive and powerful.
Thanks to some publicity on YouTube, this work became somewhat widely known.