No abstract available.

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) works with faculty at all stages of the pipeline to create measureable change at their educational institutions. While faculty are typically committed to this work, they often do not have the time or expertise to create clear, measureable goals that can be assessed and reported to funders or administration. In this BoF, participants will work with NCWIT-developed change tracking tools, and social scientists to develop goals for their home institutions. To gain the most out of the session, please bring your Internet enabled device to try hands-on activities during the session.

Flipped classrooms are a new twist on an old idea: homework. The basic formula is simple: do the prep work before coming to class and come to class ready to discuss that work, do an activity to reinforce what you learned, or even take a quiz on the reading or research that was assigned. But as with all approaches to teaching, the reality is never that simple. This panel will report the experiences of four "flippers" and explore the pros and cons of those experiences. Educators who are considering flipping all or part of their courses will gain insight into how to do so to their and, more importantly, their students'-advantage, while those who have used this technique may gain new insights into approaches that might help them be more successful if they faced any issues similar to those of the panelists.

The inverted classroom is a pedagogical technique in which passive knowledge acquisitions activities (e.g. lecture, readings) are assigned as homework and hands-on knowledge assimilation tasks (e.g. problem solving, lab, creative work) replace traditional lecture during classroom contact hours. Recent initiatives like the Kahn Academy [1] have raised the visibility of the inverted classroom and it is being adopted in disciplines across the curriculum from Economics [2] to Biology [3]. In this experience report we present successful inverted classroom pilots in linear algebra and introductory programming classes. In particular, this pilot focused on combining the inverted classroom philosophy with other proven pedagogical techniques (e.g. inquiry based learning) there was also a focus on creating free materials that could replace traditional, expensive textbooks when using the inverted classroom. We explain how the inverted classroom pedagogy is well aligned with the hands-on practice required in both math and computer science and discuss our plans to continue our experiment and to expand it beyond the original two classes.

The Inverted Classroom is an exciting pedagogical technique where more passive information assimilation activities (e.g. lectures) are assigned as homework and class time is reserved for active applied problem solving and group activities. With current technology, instructors wishing to implement inverted classroom have a variety of options to create engaging and accessible learning modules. In this workshop, we will provide an overview of inverted classroom philosophy and some initial data from successful pilots of the inverted classroom. Participants will work in small groups to develop small inverted classroom activities using software and technology provided by the presenters. We will wrap up with presentations from the groups and a discussion about assessment. Laptop Recommended.

In order to collaborate with people in the real world, cognitive systems must be able to represent and reason about spatial regions in human environments. Consider the command "go to the front of the classroom". The spatial region mentioned (the front of the classroom) is not perceivable using geometry alone. Instead it is defined by its functional use, implied by nearby objects and their configuration. In this paper, we define such areas as context-dependent spatial regions and present a cognitive system able to learn them by combining qualitative spatial representations, semantic labels, and analogy. The system is capable of generating a collection of qualitative spatial representations describing the configuration of the entities it perceives in the world. It can then be taught context-dependent spatial regions using anchor pointsdefined on these representations. From this we then demonstrate how an existing computational model of analogy can be used to detect context-dependent spatial regions in previously unseen rooms. To evaluate this process we compare detected regions to annotations made on maps of real rooms by human volunteers.

Many information sources use multiple modalities, such as textbooks, which contain both text and diagrams. Each captures information that is hard to express in the other, and evidence suggests that multimodal information leads to better retention and transfer in human learners. This paper describes a system that captures textbook knowledge, using simplified English text and sketched versions of diagrams. We present experimental results showing it can use captured knowledge to answer questions from the textbook's curriculum.