Hello! I am Fenia (officially, Efthimia). I am Assistant Professor at the Centre for Education and Learning at the Technical University of Delft.
I am currently organizing, together with George Fletcher and Daphne Miedema, the DataEd SIGMOD workshop on Data Systems Education.
*Hiring! PhD Position: Collaborative Practices in Computer Science Education*
Research
I do research in computing education and software engineering. My research interests include collaborative learning, data science education, teaching approaches, informal and lifelong education, and gender diversity. I used to do research on trust management and networks security.
Here is a list of selected publications. For a full list, you can check google scholar.
- Daphne Miedema, Toni Taipalus, Efthimia Aivaloglou. Students’ Perceptions on Engaging Database Domains and Structures. ACM SIGCSE 2023 (full paper)
- Vivian van der Werf, Min Yi Zhang, Efthimia Aivaloglou, Felienne Hermans, and Marcus Specht. Variables in Practice. An Observation of Teaching Variables in Introductory Programming MOOCs. ACM ITiCSE 2023
- Daphne Miedema, George H. L. Fletcher, Efthimia Aivaloglou. Expert Perspectives on Student Errors in SQL. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ, 2022 (full paper)
- Daphne Miedema, George H. L. Fletcher, Efthimia Aivaloglou. So many brackets! An analysis of how SQL learners (mis) manage complexity during query formulation. In ICPC ’22 (full paper)
- Shirley de Wit, Felienne Hermans, Efthimia Aivaloglou. Children’s Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes on the Gender, Social Skills, and Interests of a Computer Scientist. In ICER ’21 (dataset, full paper)
- Daphne Miedema, Efthimia Aivaloglou, George H. L. Fletcher. Identifying SQL Misconceptions of Novices: Findings from a Think-Aloud Study. In ICER ’21 (summary, presentation, full paper)
- Efthimia Aivaloglou, Anna van der Meulen. An Empirical Study of Students’ Perceptions on the Setup and Grading of Group Programming Assignments. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ, 21(3), March 2021 (summary, pdf)
- Anna van der Meulen, Efthimia Aivaloglou. Who Does What? Work Division and AllocationStrategies of Computer Science Student Teams. ICSE SEET 2021 (summary, pdf)
- Ad Zeevaarders, Efthimia Aivaloglou. Exploring the Programming Concepts Practiced by Scratch Users: An Analysis of Project Repositories. IEEE EDUCON2021 (pdf)
- Sabiha Yeni, Efthimia Aivaloglou, and Felienne Hermans. To Be or Not to Be a Teacher? Exploring CS Students’ Perceptions of a Teaching Career. In Koli Calling ’20 (pdf)
- Efthimia Aivaloglou and Felienne Hermans. How is programming taught in code clubs? Exploring the experiences and gender perceptions of code club teachers. In Koli Calling ’19 (summary, pdf, presentation recorded at the Cambridge Computing Education Research Symposium 2020)
- Efthimia Aivaloglou and Felienne Hermans. Early Programming Education and Career Orientation: the Effects of Gender, Self-Efficacy, Motivation and Stereotypes. ACM SIGCSE 2019 (summary, pdf)
- Felienne Hermans, Alaaeddin Swidan, Efthimia Aivaloglou and Marileen Smit. Thinking out of the box: comparing metaphors for variables in programming education. WiPSCE ’18 (summary, pdf)
- Felienne Hermans, Alaaeddin Swidan and Efthimia Aivaloglou. Code phonology: an exploration into the vocalization of code. ICPC ’18 (summary, pdf)
- Efthimia Aivaloglou, David Hoepelman, and Felienne Hermans. Parsing excel formulas: A grammar and its application on four large datasets. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 29(12), 2017 (pdf)
- Felienne Hermans and Efthimia Aivaloglou. Teaching software engineering principles to k-12 students: A MOOC on scratch. In ICSE ’17 (summary, pdf)
- Felienne Hermans and Efthimia Aivaloglou. To Scratch or not to Scratch?: A controlled experiment comparing plugged first and unplugged first programming lessons. WiPSCE ’17 (summary, pdf)
- Gregorio Robles, Jess Moreno-Len, Efthimia Aivaloglou, and Felienne Hermans. Software clones in scratch projects: on the presence of copy-and-paste in computational thinking learning. In IWSC 2017 (pdf)
- Efthimia Aivaloglou and Felienne Hermans. How kids code and how we know: An exploratory study on the scratch repository. In ICER ’16 (pdf)
- Felienne Hermans and Efthimia Aivaloglou. Do code smells hamper novice programming? a controlled experiment on scratch programs. In ICPC 2016 (pdf)
Teaching
I am teaching/have taught the following courses:
- Software Development for the Bachelor Bioinformatica, the Bachelor Informatica & Economie and the Bachelor Artificial Intelligence
- Algorithms and Data Structures for the Bachelor Bioinformatica and the Bachelor Informatica & Economie
- Software Architecture (IM0203) for the Master in Software Engineering and for the OU’s certification program
- Concepts of Programming Languages (IB2702) for the Bachelor Computer Science
- Academic Writing (IB2002, IM0001) for the Bachelor Computer Science and the Master in Software Engineering
Project supervision
PhD researchers
MSc students
If you are interested to do an MSc thesis with me, please contact me. You can choose any of the currently available topics or propose one that I can supervise.
- Marco Jansen (graduated in February 2022): Grading software engineering group projects based on individual contributions.
- Jelmer Golsteijn (graduated in July 2022): Identifying age and gender and analyzing their relation to programming behaviour of Scratch users.
- Tanishq Likhi (graduated in February 2022): Effects of the power distance index on multicultural software engineering teams.
- Zaher Alyousef (graduated in December 2021): Challenges in low code development.
- Ben Nieuwhof (graduated in July 2021): Attractiveness of Open Source Software projects to new contributors.
- Shangyi Tang (graduated in December 2020): Clustering Scratch programs.
- Jan Jaap Sandee (graduated in October 2020): Using metrics mined from software repositories to assist in individual guidance of students’ group programming projects.
- Ad Zeevaarders (graduated in July 2020): Exploring the learning progression of Scratch users.
- Orla Dijkink (graduated in April 2020): Occurrence of code smells in low-code.
Tools & Datasets
- XLParser: A C# Excel formula parser, extensively tested with publicly available spreadsheets datasets, which you can play with here
- GitCanary: A tool for analyzing student contributions in group programming assignments, developed and maintained by Jan Jaap Sandee, presented in this tool paper.
- Scratch dataset: Scraped data for 250K Scratch projects
- (New) Scratch dataset: Scraped data for 112K Scratch users and their 1 million projects, as presented here
- The Spreadsheet labelling game and its exciting implementation story
Contact
Email address: E.Aivaloglou@tudelft.nl
Visiting address: TU Delft Building 28 – Room 2W.660, Van Mourik Broekmanweg 6, 2628 XE, Delft