SPLICE:
Standards, Protocols, and Learning Infrastructure for Computing Education
Welcome to the home of the SPLICE project. Our mission is to support the CS Education community by supplying documentation and infrastructure to help with adopting shared standards, protocols, and tools. In this way we hope to promote
- development and broader re-use of innovative learning content that is instrumented for rich data collection;
- formats and tools for analysis of learner data; and
- best practices to make large collections of learner data and associated analytics available to researchers in the CSE, data science, and learner science communities.
Need technical assistance? If you need some help getting LTI to work with your application, or similar technology, our community might be able to give advice.
- Take a look at our tutorials
- Join the SPLICE Google Group, and ask the community.
- See the SPLICE Catalog.
- See our Glossary for commonly used terms related to CS Education research and technology.
For a fuller description of our vision and goals, see the overview from our successful NSF proposal.
Recent News and Upcoming Events
- The 9th SPLICE Workshop on Technology and Data Infrastructure for CS Education Researchin conjunction with SIGCSE 2024 on Saturday, March 23, 2024.
- July, 2023: We hosted the Computing Education Research (CER) track at CMU's LearnLab summer school in Pittsburgh. In this track, students learned how to create, improve and evaluate interactive learning content, instructional materials, learning technologies, and analytics for computer science education. They also learned how this design process is informed by existing CER research, and to use their results to further understand how people learn computer science, as well as how to improve their learning. For more information, see the Summer School pages.
- April, 2023: Following the successful conclusion to our 8th SPLICE workshop on March 15 in Toronto, we have created some new working groups on Smart Learning Content Protocols, Parsons Problems Interoperability Standards, and Large Language Models. See the Working Groups section below for details.
- August, 2022: NSF's CISE Community Research Infrastructure (CCRI) program has awarded a second grant to support the SPLICE project! "An Infrastructure for Sustainable Innovation and Research in Computer Science Education" supports the continued collaboration of University of Pitssburgh (Peter Brusilovsky), CMU (Ken Koedinger), Virginia Tech (Cliff Shaffer), North Carolina State University (Thomas Price and Tiffany Barnes). For more details, see here.
Previous Associated Workshops
- The Eighth SPLICE Workshop on Technology and Data Infrastructure for CS Education Research in conjunction with SIGCSE 2023 in Toronto on Wednesday, March 15, 2023.
- 7th Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM) Workshop @ LAK 2023, March 14, 2023.
- 6th Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM) Workshop @ EDM 2022, July 27th, 2022.
- 5th Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM)Virtual Workshop @ EDM 2021, June 29th, 2021.
- Third Workshop on Intelligent Textbooks (iTextbooks) at AIED 2021, The 22th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, June 15, 2021.
- Seventh SPLICE Workshop at SIGCSE 2021 (Virtual event), March 15-16: "CS Education Infrastructure for All III: From Ideas to Practice"
- Sixth SPLICE Workshop at L@S 2020 (Virtual event), August 12, 2020: "Building an Infrastructure for Computer Science Education Research and Practice at Scale"
- 4th Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM) Virtual Workshop @ EDM 2020, July 10, 2020.
- Second Workshop on Intelligent Textbooks @ AIED 2020, July 6, 2020.
- Fifth SPLICE Workshop at ICER 2019, August 11, 2019, in Toronto: "Computing Science Education Infrastructure: From Tools to Data"
- 3rd Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM) Workshop @ AIED 2019, June 25, 2019.
- 2nd Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM) Workshop @ LAK2019, March 5, 2019.
- Fourth SPLICE Workshop at SIGCSE 2019, February 2019 in Minneapolis: "CS Education Infrastructure for All II: Enabling the Change"
- Third SPLICE Workshop, August 2018 in Espoo, Finland: "Computing Science Educational Infrastructure: Crossing the Borders"
- 1st Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM) Workshop @ EDM2018, July 15, 2018
- Second SPLICE Workshop, February 2018 in Baltimore: "CS Education Infrastructure for All: Interoperability for Tools and Data Analytics"
- First SPLICE Workshop, June 2017 in Pittsburgh: "Community-building or data-intensive computer and computing science education infrastructure research"
SPLICE Working Groups
- Replicating Programming Interventions. Leader: Thomas Price. Google Group.
- Smart Learning Content Protocols. Leaders: Cay Horstmann, Steve Edwards, Cliff Shaffer
- Parsons Problems Interoperability Standards. Leader: Cliff Shaffer and [need some more!]. Google Group.
- Reusable Code Examples. Leaders: Peter Brusilovsky, Vasile Rus
- Large Language Models. Leaders: Juho Leinonen, Bita Akram. Google Group.
- Small Code Snapshots (ProgSnap). Leaders: Thomas Price and Ayaan Kazerouni.
- Programming Exercise Markup Language (PEML). Leaders: Phill Conrad, Cory Bart, and Stephen Edwards.
- Packaging Curricular Materials. Leaders: Cory Bart, Phill Conrad, Michael Hilton, Bob Edmison.
- Interoperable Data Collection. Leaders: Michael Yudelson.
Resources
- SPLICE Google group
- Repositories
- SPLICE GitHub organization
- GitHub Repository for LTI examples and support
- SPLICE Catalog: Smart Learning Content and education data sets.
- PEML Ruby Gem
- Documentation
- Best Practice Examples
- Administrative Policy
This section provides a collection of resources related to many non-technical issues that CS Education researchers and systems builders have to deal with. This includes things like:- University Educational Data Access policies
- Hosting information
- Examples of IRB Protocols
- HECVAT, VPAT and similar security/privacy statement examples
- Project scale-up and lifecycle examples
Standards Documentation
Project Support
- SPLICE is supported by the National Science Foundation and by Virginia Tech's Technology-enhanced learning and Online Strategies unit (see more).