Two papers accepted to SIGCSE 2026. I'm an undergrad

2026-07-29 · Yusuf Gadelrab

The first one asks a question that sounds simple and isn't: what happens to a student learning to code when the programming language is in English and their thinking isn't?

We ran a mixed-methods study, 60 participants, IRB approved, in Dr. Ethel Tshukudu's CSEd lab at SJSU. Students who worked through the workshop reported significant gains in confidence, computing identity, enjoyment and motivation, and the novices gained the most.

Confidence is not a soft metric in intro CS. Confidence is the thing that decides whether someone comes back for the second class. Retention in CS1 is a leaky bucket and most of the leak happens in the first six weeks, before anyone has learned enough to fail on the merits.

The second paper is a poster on adaptive curriculum maps: graph-augmented retrieval over course material, so an LLM tutor knows what the student hasn't learned yet instead of confidently explaining recursion to someone who hasn't seen a function.

Paper 1: https://doi.org/10.1145/3770761.3777339

I got into this lab as a freshman by emailing a professor and saying I'd do the boring part. Every undergrad reading this can do that. The email is free.