Ken Jen Lee

Tavian Barnes, Ken Jen Lee, Cristina Tavares et al.

The traditional path to a software engineering career usually involves a post-secondary diploma in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field. However, many individuals working as software engineers take a non-traditional path to their careers, starting from other industries or fields of study. This paper explores the barriers that individuals with non-traditional educational and occupational backgrounds face when pursuing a software engineering career and proposes potential strategies to overcome those barriers. A two-stage methodology was used, consisting of an exploratory study followed by a follow-up survey. The exploratory study consisted of a grounded-theory-based qualitative analysis of relevant Reddit data to yield a framework around the barriers and possible mitigation strategies. These findings were then supplemented through a follow-up survey. Understanding these barriers and what strategies could be effective is an important step towards making software engineering more accessible to individuals with non-traditional backgrounds. In addition to fostering functional diversity, this might also serve to tackle labor shortages within the software engineering industry.

Ken Jen Lee, Edith Law

In this position paper, we aim to spark more discussions surrounding the use of empathy as the intended outcome of many studies on immersive virtual reality experiences. As a construct, empathy has many significant flaws that may lead to unintended and negative outcomes, going against our original goal of employing these technologies for the betterment of society. We highlight the possible advantages of designing for rational compassion instead, and propose alternative research directions and outcome measurements for immersive virtual reality that urgently warrant our attention.

Ken Jen Lee, Apoorva Chauhan, Joslin Goh et al.

While learning by teaching is a popular pedagogical technique, it is a learning phenomenon that is difficult to study due to variability in the tutor-tutee pairings and learning environments. In this paper, we introduce the Curiosity Notebook, a web-based research infrastructure for studying learning by teaching via the use of a teachable agent. We describe and provide rationale for the set of features that are essential for such a research infrastructure, outline how these features have evolved over two design iterations of the Curiosity Notebook and through two studies -- a 4-week field study with 12 elementary school students interacting with a NAO robot and an hour-long online observational study with 41 university students interacting with an agent -- demonstrate the utility of our platform for making observations of learning-by-teaching phenomena in diverse learning environments. Based on these findings, we conclude the paper by reflecting on our design evolution and envisioning future iterations of the Curiosity Notebook.