Laurie Murphy

Laurie Murphy
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science & Computer Engineering
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, Washington 98447
Office: Morken Center, Rm 255
Telephone: 253.535.8729
Email: lmurphy@plu.edu
Check my on line schedule for office hours
Publications Current vita

Course Web Page - Spring 2010

CSCE 144 -- Introduction to Computer Science

Other Course Web Pages

Research and Professional Activities

My main research interest is Computer Science Education, in particular active and cooperative learning, classroom assessment, novice debugging, pair programming, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minority students in CS.

Recent and Ongoing Activities

I am Editor (jointly with Sally Fincher) for the journal Computer Science Education.
I am a member of the International Computing Education Research Workshop (ICER 2010) program committee.
I am currently participating in an NSF funded Workshop on qualitative research methods for CS education. Our second meeting will be held at SIGCSE 2010 in Milwaukee, WI.
In October 2009, David Wolff and I presented our paper on using video podcasts in CS1 (see publications) at the annual CCSC-NW conference held here at PLU.
In March 2009, a paper I co-authored on advice from students about how to succeed in CS1 (see publications) was presented at the 2009 SIGCSE Conference in Chattanooga, TN.
In September 2008, a paper I co-authored on using a self-theories intervention in CS (see publications) was presented at the International Computing Education Research Workshop (ICER) in Syndey, Australia.
In June 2008, a paper I co-authored on the implications of self-theories research on CS education (see publications) was presented at the ACM's Conference on Inovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) in Madrid, Spain.
In May 2008, David Wolff and I were awarded a grant from the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium (NWACC) to implement and study the effects of using theoretically grounded screencasts and annotated worked examples in CS1 (project website).
In spring of 2008, I was awarded a PLU Regency Advancment Award to study novice pair debugging.
In March 2008, I presented a paper I co-authored on novice debugging strategies (see publications) at the annual ACM SIGCSE conference in Portland, OR.
I was a discussant at the 2008 SIGCSE Doctoral Consortium.
I am currently working with the DEBUG Group, a multi-institutional, distributed research group of CS educators from across the country (we "meet" each week using VoIP software called Marratech). Papers describing our debugging literature review and multi-institutional study of the debugging skills of novice programmers (see publications) were published in CSE in June 2008. A paper describing results of our investigation of the role of self-theories in introductory programming appeared in ICER 2008. Currently we are working on a review of the pair-programming literature and an analysis of pair debugging data.
In recent years I have enjoyed teaching Scratch to middle school girls (materials), volunteering as an Alice workshop facilitator at Expanding Your Horizons, a day-long conference for middle school girls, and as a judge at the annual MESA Day competition.

Past Activities

In September 2007 I attended the Third International Computing Education Research Workshop (ICER '07) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. At ICER I also attended a Statistics Bootcamp for Computer Science Education Researchers and I served on the ICER '07 program committee.
During the fall 2006 and winter 2007 quarters, I participated in an educational theory course called How People Learn at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. During the first quarter we read the course's title text, studied classic educational theorists such as Dewey, Vygotsky and Piaget, and explored how brain biology and peoples' theories of intelligence relate to teaching and learning. The second quarter focused on a wide range of topics such as the educational impacts of culture, race and class, constructivist educational theories and emotional intelligence.
In conjunction with ICER '06, I attended The Second International Workshop on Phenomenography in Computing Education Research (PhICER). A paper summarizing the results of the PhICER II experiment (see publications) was presented at the Koli Calling Conference in Finland in November 2007. The PhICER subgroup I worked with presented a paper at ICER '07 in September (see publications).
During the 2005-06 academic year I participated in a Disciplinary Commons project organized by Josh Tenenberg at the University of Washington, Tacoma. In May 2006 we gave a presentation describing the project at the Pacific Northwest Higher Education Teaching & Learning Conference in Vancouver, WA.
During 2006 I participated in and acted as facilitator for a faculty study seminar as part of the PLU Wild Hope Project.
In March 2006, a paper I co-authored on gender differences in the learning of programming concepts (see publications) was presented at the annual ACM SIGCSE conference in Houston, TX.
For several years I worked with a group of CS educators from around the country on a study investigating the programming knowledge structures of computer science seniors. The study was a follow-up to one conducted during the Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science Education project. The original study used a knowledge aquisition technique called a repeated single-criterion card sort to investigate the knowledge structures of novice programmers.
In October 2005 David Wolff and I presented our paper on electronic classroom assessment (see publications) and I participated on a panel titled "Models for Computer Science K-12 Outreach Activities" at the annual CCSC-NW conference in Bothell, WA.
During 2004-05 David Wolff and I sponsored an undergraduate research project funded by a Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates (CRUE) grant from the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). Two PLU CS majors, April Buckley and Kristen Wilson, implemented a "Lab CATs" project that involved the electronic implementation of three Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) for use in introductory CS labs. We are continuing our work with electronic CATs in a classroom setting in the CSCE department's computer classroom in the Morken Center for Learning and Technology.

Professional Organizations