Best Presentation Award to Leinonen and Hellas at Koli Calling '17

The article “Thought Crimes and Profanities whilst Programming” by Juho Leinonen and Arto Hellas received the best presentation award at the 2017 Koli Calling -conference. Koli Calling is an international conference on computing education research that is published in the ACM Digital Library. This year, the conference had almost 80 participants from 19 different countries. 
 
The article and presentation painted a totalitarian view of data management and highlighted the possibilities of what one can do with simple working process data. This aspect of data processing is especially important with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. The article and presentation generated a lot of interest and sparked vivid discussions at the conference.
 
Where should we draw the line of inappropriate conduct on a course that is given freely to anyone? If an individual starts profusely swearing on a lecture, they are most likely expelled from the class or even from the course. But what if they do it outside the lecture amongst their classmates, amongst a group of anonymous individuals - or by themselves? In this article, we study how students use profanities in source code when they are completing programming assignments on a massive open online course (MOOC). We examine how common it is to curse in source code as well as whether specific assignments incite more cursing than others. Additionally, we investigate differences between participants with regards to cursing. Our results indicate that a considerable amount of participants write curse words whilst programming, but most clean their code for the final submission. The data also shows that there are different degrees of profanity in use, ranging from quite inoffensive words to offensive racial slurs. Finally, we discuss options that one may take when individuals who swear are identified, starting from rescinding their right to study.
 
22.11.2017 - 18:18 Henrik Nygren
22.11.2017 - 18:18 Henrik Nygren