Undergraduate Research

Your ideas will be strongly encouraged and supported, but if you need an idea, here is some work Dr. Wagner is currently investigating:

Creating a Tactile Input Modality: This work requires the use of Arduinos and Raspberry Pis to enable students with visual impairments to have an alternate input modality when programming with block languages. Click here to see previous work.
- Applied Computer Science Minor, Roger Wang, conducted further research on this topic. His research was well received. He presented at ACM MidSoutheast, was awarded 2 ^nd place in the ACM SIGCSE 2019 Student Research Competition, and had a paper accepted to the ACM Southeast 2019 conference (17.95% acceptance rate).

Creating a Vocal User Interface: There has been substantial work on creating vocal user interfaces to interact with block programming, but there is still a great deal to be done. Check out http://myna.cs.ua.edu.
Evaluating a Vocal User Interface: There are numerous empirical methods for evaluating graphical user interfaces, but there are no existing empirical methods for evaluating vocal user interfaces. This work would be the foundation for establishing these evaluation methods.
Creating block programming languages to teach elementary students computational thinking while strengthening math and/or reading skills.
- During the 2018-2019 academic year, Applied Computer Science Minor, Rebecca Weston, and Dr. Wagner worked collaboratively on a Vail Fellowship to create a math programming game for first and second grade students.