Cs student laptop and computer lab usage as a factor of success in computing education

Abstract

Computing Education Research (CER) implicitly assumes that CS undergraduate students have no barrier to access a learning platform or software package. The assumption that everyone has access to and uses a device endangers the validity of CER studies by overlooking a critical element in what students access and how students use computing resources. First, in this work, we explicitly investigate undergraduate student usage (how often) of computing resources (laptops and computer labs) on a university campus. Furthermore, we investigate whether CS student usage of laptops and computer labs are factors of success in computing education to close a crucial feedback loop for CER and CS educators. Second, previous studies studying student's technology equipped used qualitative surveys, and lacked a systematic and continuous view of the student population. In this work, we address this shortcoming by developing a method to use operational data sets from the wireless networks and computer labs on campus. Operational data sets provide a systematic and continuous coverage of all students, that is, a student's absence of usage becomes a data point instead of a missing point. Results indicate that the use of equipment levels may be lower than national average. Nevertheless, there exists a positive correlation between higher frequency of laptop usage and success in computing education.