Jacob Yim

This innovative practice paper presents an analysis of data collected from the implementation of a teaming curriculum, Teaming by Design (TxD), across design and innovation courses. The study examines the successes and challenges identified by both undergraduate and graduate students in their teamwork experiences. The analysis draws on written reflections from 2,621 students enrolled in 47 design and innovation courses at the University of California, Berkeley. The identified themes from student reflections were compared with those derived from a comprehensive review of the teaming literature to pinpoint overlaps and gaps. Our findings reveal opportunities for refining project-based course structures and enhancing teaming pedagogy, with the goal of better equipping students with the essential teamwork skills they will need in their professional careers.

Equitable grading practices and flexible deadline policies have previously demonstrated positive student learning and well-being outcomes. In this poster, we contribute a framework for flexible extension policies that emphasize equitable grading. We then analyze extension requests and grades obtained by students in a Data Science course with a flexible extension policy. We present two research questions based on this data. RQ1: How does the length of an extension relate to student performance on the corresponding assignment? RQ2: How does student extension usage across the semester relate to students' learning of the content?

In this work, we present the development of an automated extension tool that supports flexible extension policies. Students interact with a wide range of extension policies in similar ways; in particular, some students repeatedly request multi-day long extensions. When scaled to courses with hundreds or potentially thousands of students, course staff time is the limiting resource preventing adequate student support. We present a tool to help automate a range of extension processes. The use of this tool should reduce staff load while increasing individualized student support, through email communication and consequent recovery of student agency. Our early research questions are: Does the extension tool reduce barriers and stigma around asking for assistance? Does the tool lessen the wait time between requesting and receiving an extension, and how does the tool improve students' learning experience in the course? These questions will help inform us about how an automated tool for flexible extensions helps support growing course sizes and students who may not otherwise receive the support they need for their success and well-being in the course.

Program synthesizers—tools that automatically generate code based on a user-provided specification—aim to lighten the burden of programming by ideally swapping the cost of manually performing a task or writing code for a task with the cost of writing a specification for that task. A concern of fundamental importance to the usability of these synthesizers is therefore to ensure that the specification cost is less than the manual cost. In this short paper, we discuss methods from human-computer interaction, techniques from software engineering and data mining, and theories from cognitive science that could directly help answer the question of what tasks are amenable to having specifications derived from users’ existing behaviors and processes rather than having users go out of their way to provide something new to the synthesizer—thereby ensuring the cost of specification is appropriately lower. We hope that this discussion is useful for synthesis designers and sparks interest in further investigation into how we can derive specifications from users’ existing behaviors and processes.

The characteristics of DNA methylation changes that occur during neurogenesis in vivo remain unknown. We used whole-genome bisulfite sequencing to quantitate DNA cytosine modifications in differentiating neurons and their progenitors isolated from mouse brain at the peak of embryonic neurogenesis. Localized DNA hypomethylation was much more common than hypermethylation and often occurred at putative enhancers within genes that were upregulated in neurons and encoded proteins crucial for neuronal differentiation. The hypomethylated regions strongly overlapped with mapped binding sites of the key neuronal transcription factor NEUROD2. The 5-methylcytosine oxidase ten-eleven translocation 2 (TET2) interacted with NEUROD2, and its reaction product 5-hydroxymethylcytosine accumulated at the demethylated regions. NEUROD2-targeted differentially methylated regions retained higher methylation levels in Neurod2 knockout mice, and inducible expression of NEUROD2 caused TET2-associated demethylation at its in vivo binding sites. The data suggest that the reorganization of DNA methylation in developing neurons involves NEUROD2 and TET2-mediated DNA demethylation.