The SIGCSE community (ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education) is fairly large and quite diverse. Computing educators from all across the world and all levels (K-16+) gather to discuss tools, techniques, and research that might inform our work as techers of computing.
At the intersection of tools and research lies the Comment Mentor (COMTOR) project, which is led by Peter DePasquale, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at The College of New Jersey. The COMTOR project combines Peter's passions at the intersection of computer science education research and the development of robust, distributed applications in the cloud.
While most educators agree that instruction of the commenting of source code is an important practice, there exists no well-defined methodology for its instruction. The Comment Mentor project (COMTOR) seeks to provide a method for both providing feedback to student developers and to help instructors automatically analyze and grade comments within source code. COMTOR is an open source project which provides a number of engagement opportunities for contributors at all levels and which seeks to expand its developer base.
This interview is approximately 12 minutes long, and in it Peter talks about the commenting of code and how we both teach and then study this complex practice.
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