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 focus now is broadly in Computing/CS Education Research (CER/CSEd). This includes but is NOT equal to the art of teaching computing/CS. Saying CER/CSEd is the art of how to teach computing/CS puts the emphasis on the wrong people. A better way is to say it's studying how to learn computing/CS better so we focus on the learners. An even better way is to define it as studying how to make the learning environment better for computing/CS learners. Now, my actual research seeks to characterize computing students' help-seeking behavior and tendencies, with an emphasis on investigating help-seeking behavior across multiple help resources and help-seeking tendency across multiple instructional contexts.

My research in the past 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.

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.

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