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.

In my current main research theme, I seek to 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 falling in love with CER/CSEd, my research has spanned some very theoretical and some very empirical subfields/topics but generally falls 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. CER/CSEd 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).

News

Date	News
2024/10	Experience report (title: Satisfactory for all: supporting mastery learning with human-in-the-loop assessments in a discrete mathematics course) on the discrete math course I taught in Spring 2024 accepted into ACM SIGCSE TS 2025. When will I start writing the blog posts about it...?
2024/10	New research paper (title: Student Perceptions of the Help Resource Landscape) accepted into ACM SIGCSE TS 2025. This is a collaboration work with NC State via our grant team.
2024/8	I attended and enjoyed ACM ICER 2024, where I presented my paper titled The trees in the forest: characterizing computing students' individual help-seeking approaches. Here is a blog post in which I mumbled about the paper. On related but totally irrelevant news, I celebrated my birthday on the plane from Melbourne back to the US, which made my birthday a joyfully 41-hours long.
2024/5	I wrapped up my first class ever. This was the first class I taught as a instructor. It was a mandatory discrete math with 138 students in a regular semester, and I did it solo. It was quite a project! I will be have been procrastinating on writing a series of blog posts about it.
2023/11	A poster resulting from mentoring a project team in the Duke CS+ summer program got accepted to ACM SIGCSE TS '24. This marks my first research publication in which I served as mainly a project manager/research mentor.
2023/8	I attended SIGCSE 2023 Doctoral Consortium at ICER in Chicago in August (research statement).
2023/3	I presented my first paper in CER (What Drives Students to Office Hours: Individual Differences and Similarities) at ACM SIGCSE TS '23 in Toronto.
2022/12	I received the Bass Instructor of Record Fellowship, a teaching grant sponsored through the Duke Graduate School. As a result I will be teaching taught CompSci 230 (Discrete Math for CS) in the Spring 2024 semester.
2022/5	I started to work in CER.