Shao-Heng Ko

About Me

I am a PhD candidate/course instructor at Duke CS, where I am advised by the amazing Kristin Stephens-Martinez. Shao-Heng is my first name; Shao is not.

My research interest is broadly in Computing/CS Education Research (CER/CSEd). This includes but does NOT equal to the art of teaching computing/CS -- that puts the emphasis on the wrong people. Instead, I think of CER/CSEd as studying how to make the learning environment better for computing/CS learners. My current research seeks to quantitatively characterize computing students' help-seeking approach, behavior, and tendencies, with an emphasis on investigating help-seeking approach across multiple help resources and across multiple instructional contexts.

Before stepping in to CER, I wandered through some very theoretical and some very empirical parts of CS. All those works fall under the umbrella of algorithms for the real world, where the real world included e-commerce, pricing, social networks, as well as redistricting and gerrymandering. Those are documented in here. Partially because of this background, I am also very interested in algorithms/discrete math/theory of computing pedagogy, and more broadly, any non-programming-based CS pedagogy. Computing education is full of programming experts and programming pedagogy experts; I proudly consider myself NOT one of them.

Before Duke, I worked at Academia Sinica. Prior to that, I got my BS and MS from National Taiwan University. I am from the tropical harbor city Kaohsiung, Taiwan. From 1895-1945 the city was once Takao, Japan. In the 17th century, it was Takau, Dutch Formosa.

Outside of academics, I am a lifelong baseball fan/player (for 20+ years now). I learned most of my data science/database skills through Sabermetrics 101 on EdX. I read baseball analytics on Fangraphs daily. There used to be a whole page on my personal website about baseball. However, I stopped playing competitively after the pandemic, and that page got me sad, so I removed it. There's a picture of me playing baseball somewhere on this page; try find it (sorry, not mobile friendly).

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