‘The Social Network’ for computer science

Computer science majors may have an answer to the solitude and difficulty of working alone through introductory courses with the use of a new social media tool.

A team co-led by associate professor Chris Hundhausen and graduate student Adam Carter has been developing a social media platform targeted at beginning computer science students.

The goal of the website is to give students an outlet to help each other by sharing information and pieces of computer code.

“Students, especially those that leave computer science, don’t feel very connected to their classmates, the major, the department,” Carter said. “Often students learn as much from themselves as any other kind of source. So learning together is beneficial to a student’s success.”

Many feel a sense of loneliness and isolation as group work and peer interaction is not common, Hundhausen said.

“Early computer science courses stress individual assignments,” Hundhausen said. “Collaboration is either discouraged or prohibited. This leads to students having to go it alone.”

The lack of a social community in introductory computer science courses is a main reason for the low retention rates in the courses, with usually 35-45 percent of students leaving the program, he said.

Hundhausen said the motivation behind creating the website falls in line with current social media trends.

“Social media environments are clearly an important place for young people to interact and socialize,” he said. “It seemed natural to explore the potential for social media environments to help students learn in a more social way.”

About 90 percent of young adults use social networking sites regularly, so mixing computer science with social media makes sense, he said.

“We are particularly excited about the prospect of students being able to interact with social media environment embedded directly within their computer programming environment,” Hundhausen said. “They wouldn’t have to switch contexts in order to check on their peers’ activities or to ask and answer questions.”

College of Education assistant professor Olusola Adesope believes the program will benefit students’ performance.

“We believe that by training computer science students to solve problems collaboratively, we are encouraging them to adopt real life social problem solving and programming skills,” Adesope said. “This alignment will help students when they eventually graduate and enter the workforce.”

The team also looks to expand into creating social media sites for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) majors.

“The idea of using a social media environment to support student discussions about their learning activities generalizes beyond computer programming,” Hundhausen said. “Imagine the ability in a chemical engineering course to see your peers’ progress and to interact with your peers as you work on common material and energy balance programs.”

Hundhausen said the network could apply to any other major as well.

“In any discipline in which students create something, one could make that creation process more social and engaging, by embedding a social media environment directly into the environment,” he said.

Carter said the website is not solely just for learning, but also for making connections.

“When I reflect on when I was a student, I think about the classes I did the best in and usually I had a group of students that I interacted with,” Carter said. “Often those people I interacted with are the ones I still keep up with to this day after graduating, so I think being able to make that easier to promote social interaction more is just a worthwhile effort.”