Campus Directory

Pronouns she, her, her, hers, herself

Division Baskin School of Engineering

Department/College/Unit Computer Science and Engineering

Title Adjunct Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Adjunct Faculty

Areas of Expertise Computer Science
Game Studies
Science Education
Software Engineering

Web Site

Primary Office Location Engineering Building 2
N/A

Office Hours TBA

Mail Stop SOE3

Biography, Education and Training

• Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California, San Diego
• M.S. Computer Science, University of California, San Diego
• B.A. Mathematics, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts

Summary of Expertise

• Software engineering, computer science education, children and computer game creation, testing, diversity in computer science, social issues

Research Interests

• Linda Werner has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and has extensive experience as an educator and researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, community college, high school, and junior high levels. She is actively involved in working to increase the numbers of female computer science students. Dr. Werner was the PI on an NSF-funded project on the retention of female students in computer science. She has been invited to share her research on pair programming, game programming for youth, and computer fluency at the university and middle school levels at international conferences, as well as NSF and ACM JETT/TECS sponsored workshops. In addition, she has many years of experience as a software engineer. She has consulted on an NSF GSE grant with PI, Dr. Jill Denner, to design, implement and conduct research on game design as a strategy for increasing girls’ interest, skills, and confidence in technology, for which she was active with interpretation and dissemination of results. She was also the co-PI on a one-year NSF/REESE study of computer game design and computational thinking, and received a 3-year grant from REESE that extended this work. She was a co-PI on a two-year NSF/GSE grant to study computer science students in community colleges looking at the role of motivation, family support and prior computer use (particularly digital gaming). In addition, she was involved in an NSF grant to synthesize what is known about learning when children program games. Dr. Werner's research areas include: software engineering, computer science education, children and computer game creation, testing, increasing diversity in the computer science field, and social issues. Dr. Werner is affiliated with the Center for Games and Playable Media and with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

Teaching Interests

• Software engineering
• Industry sponsored software engineering project courses
• Computer science education

Awards, Honors and Grants

HONORS AND AWARDS 

Jan 2019 The Fairy Performance Assessment: Measuring Computational Thinking in Middle School authored by Linda Werner, Jill Denner, Shannon Campe, and Damon Chizuru Kawamoto. This paper was one of twenty papers recognized by the SIGCSE community and award committee as a candidate for the SIGCSE Top Ten Symposium Papers of All Time Award.

2016 Excellence in Teaching Award, School of Engineering, UCSC

Apr 26 - Apr 30 2009 Electronic Arts Scholar, Registration scholarship for 4th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) for promoting diversity.

2005 President's Volunteer Service Bronze Award, President's Council on Service and Civic Participation.

GRANTS   Sep 2014 - Aug 2017 Co-Principal Investigator, NSF, Can Pair Programming Reduce the Gender Gap in Computing? A Study of Middle School Students Learning to Program.   

Jan 2010 - Dec 2012 Co-Principal Investigator, NSF, GSE/RES: Students' Pathways into Computer and Information Sciences Majors: A Study of Community College Men and Women. 

Jul 2009 - Jun 2012 Co-Principal Investigator, NSF, The Development of Computational Thinking among Middle School Students Creating Computer Games.   

2008 Co-Principal Investigator, NSF, SGER: Storytelling Alice and Game Design in Middle School.   

2004 Principal Investigator, NSF, ITW: Retaining Women in Computer Science Programs: Impact of Pair Programming, supplement.  

2000 Principal Investigator, NSF, ITW: Retaining Women in Computer Science Programs: Impact of Pair Programming.

Selected Presentations

 Talks and Presentations at Colleges and Universities

Jan 2012 Talk: Game Programming for 12 Year Olds, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Invited.

Selected Publications

SCHOLARLY AND CREATIVE WORK

      Contributions to Books      

2019   Book Chapter: Simon, B., Hundhausen, C., McDowell, C., Werner, L., Hu, H., & Kussmaul, C. (2019). Students As Teachers and Communicators. In S. Fincher & A. Robins (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 827-858). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108654555.030  (Feb 2019)    

2019   Book Chapter: Denner, J. & Werner, L. (2020). The Community College Experience: Enrollment and Persistence of African American and Latina Women in Computer Science. In N. Abdelrahman, B. Irby, J. Ballenger, & B. Polnick. (Eds.). Girls and Women of Color in STEM: Their Journeys in Higher Education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc. Chapter 7, pp 141-158. PEER REVIEWED    

2014   Book Chapter: Denner, Jill; Ortiz, Eloy; Campe, Shannon; and Linda Werner, "Beyond Stereotypes of Gender and Gaming: Video Games Made by Middle School Students," in Handbook of Digital Games , 1, Wiley-IEEE Press, 2014, pp.667-688, doi: 10.1002/9781118796443.ch25   

      Journal Articles      

2020   Article: Werner, Linda; Denner, Jill; Campe, Shannon; Torres, David M. Computational Sophistication of Games Programmed by Children: A Model for Its Measurement. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, v20 n2 Article 12 Apr 2020 (Apr 2020) PEER REVIEWED    

2019   Article: Denner, J., Campe, S., & Werner, L. "Does Computer Game Design and Programming Benefit Children? A Meta-Synthesis of Research." ACM Transactions on Computing Education. (Jan 16 2019) PEER REVIEWED    

2015   Article: Amy C. Hartl, Dawn DeLay, Brett Laursen, Jill Denner, Linda Werner, Shannon Campe, Eloy Ortiz, Dyadic instruction for middle school students: Liking promotes learning, Learning and Individual Differences, Volume 44, December 2015, Pages 33-39, ISSN 1041-6080, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2015.11.002. PEER REVIEWED    

2015   Article:  Jill Denner , Linda Werner , Lisa O’Connor; Women in Community College: Factors Related to Intentions to Pursue Computer Science. NAPSA Journal About Women in Higher Education, Vol. 8, Issue 2, 2015. PEER REVIEWED    

2014   Article: Jill Denner, Linda Werner, Shannon Campe, and Eloy Ortiz, "Pair Programming: Under What Conditions is it Advantageous for Middle School Students?," Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 46(3), 277-296, 2014. PEER REVIEWED        

2014   Article: Jill Denner, Linda Werner, Lisa O'Connor, and Jill Glassman, "Community college Men and Women: A Test of Three Widely Held Beliefs About Who Pursues Computer Science," Community College Review, 0091552114545624. 

2014   Article: Jill Denner, Linda Werner, Shannon Campe, and Eloy Ortiz, "Using Game Mechanics to Measure What Students Learn from Programming Games," International Journal of Game-Based Learning (IJGBL). 4(3), pp. 13-22, 2014. PEER REVIEWED    

2014   Article: Linda Werner, Jill Denner, and Shannon Campe. 2014. Children Programming Games: A Strategy for Measuring Computational Learning. ACM Transactions on Computing Education 14, 4, Article 24 (December 2014), 22 pages. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2677091. PEER REVIEWED           

2013   Article: Linda Werner, Charlie McDowell, and Jill Denner, "A First Step in Learning Analytics: Pre-processing Low-Level Alice Logging Data of Middle School Students," Journal of Educational Data Mining (JEDM), 5(2), 11-37. PEER REVIEWED    

2012   Article: Linda Werner, "Reflections on a 38 Year Career in Computer Science," New Zealand Newsletter of the Association for Women in the Sciences, 2012. (Aug 2012) INVITED    

2012   Article: Jill Denner, Linda Werner, and Eloy Ortiz, "Computer Games Created by Middle School Girls: Can They be used to Measure Understanding of Computer Science Concepts?," Computer & Education, 58(1), 240-249. (Jan 2012) PEER REVIEWED    

2012   Article: Jill Denner, Linda Werner, Jacob Martinez, and Steve Bean, "Computing Goals, Values, and Expectations: Results from an After-School Program for Girls," in Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 18(3), 199-213. PEER REVIEWED          

2011   Article: Irene Lee, Fred Martin, Jill Denner, Bob Coulter, Walter Allen, Jeri Erickson, Joyce Malyn-Smith, and Linda Werner, "Computational Thinking for Youth in Practice," ACM Inroads, 2(1), 2011. PEER REVIEWED    

2009   Article: Linda Werner and Jill Denner, "Pair Programming in Middle School: What does it look like?," Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 42(1) 29-49. PEER REVIEWED        

2006   Article: Charlie McDowell, Linda Werner, Heather Bullock, and Julian Fernald, "Pair Programming Imporves Student Retention, Confidence, and Program Quality," Communications of the ACM, 49(8), 90-95. (Aug 2006) PEER REVIEWED    

2005   Article: Linda Werner, Brian Hanks, Charlie McDowell, Heather Bullock, and Julian Fernald, "Want to Increase Retention of Your Female Students?," Computing Research News: Expanding the Pipeline Column. 17(2). (Mar 2005) PEER REVIEWED    

2005   Review: Linda Werner and Jill Denner, "Gender and the Digital Divide," book review of Gender and Computers: Understand the Digital Divide by Joel Cooper and Kimberlee D. Weaver, American Journal of Psychology, 118(4), 639-645. (Winter 2005) INVITED     

 2004   Article: Linda Werner, Brian Hanks, and Charlie McDowell, "Female Computer Science Students Who Pair Program Persist," Journal of Educational Resources in Computing (JERIC), published April 2005. (Mar 2004) PEER REVIEWED      

1991   Article: Linda Werner and William E. Howden, "An Investigation of the Applicability of Data Usage Analysis," Journal of Systems and Software. (Jul 1991) PEER REVIEWED

      Papers in Conference Proceedings      

2016   Article: Omar Ruvalcaba, Linda Werner, and Jill Denner. 2016. "Observations of Pair Programming: Variations in Collaboration Across Demographic Groups," in Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education (SIGCSE '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 90-95. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2839509.2844558 PEER REVIEWED       

2013   Article: Linda Werner, Jill Denner, Shannon Campe, Eloy Ortiz, Dawn DeLay, Amy Hartl, and Brett Laursen, "Pair Programming for Middle School Students: Does Friendship Influence Academic Outcomes?," in Proceedings of the 44th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March 2013. (Mar 2013) PEER REVIEWED    

2013   Article: Linda Werner, Charlie McDowell, and Jill Denner, "Middle School Students Using Alice: What Can we Learn from Logging Data?," in Proceedings of the 44th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March 2013 PEER REVIEWED    

2012   Article: Linda Werner, Dominic Arcamone, and Ben Ross, "Using Scrum in a Quarter-Length Undergraduate Software Engineering Course,"  Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, 2012.  PEER REVIEWED    

2012   Article: Linda Werner, Shannon Campe, and Jill Denner, "Children Learning Computer Science Concepts via Alice Game-Programming," in Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March 2012. PEER REVIEWED    

2012   Article: Linda Werner, Jill Denner, Shannon Campe, and Damon Chizuru Kawamoto, "The Fairy Performance Assessment: Measuring Computational Thinking in Middle School," in Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2012. PEER REVIEWED                        

2003   Article: Laurie Williams, Charlie McDowel, N. Nagappan, Julian Fernald, and Linda Werner, "Buidling Pair Programming Knowledge through a Family of Experiments," Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE), 143-152. (Sep 2003) PEER REVIEWED       

2003   Article: Charlie McDowell, Linda Werner, Heather Bullock, and Julian Fernald, "The Impact of Pair Programming on Student Performance, Perception, and Persistence," Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering. (May 2003) PEER REVIEWED     

2002   Article: Charlie McDowell, Linda Werner, Heather Bullock, and Julian Fernald, "The Effects of Pair Programming on Performance in an Introductory Programming Course," Proceedings of the 34th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), 38-42. (Mar 2002) PEER REVIEWED         

      Film       2006   Jill Denner, Steven Bean, Linda Werner, and Marigold Fine, "Examples of Pair Programming," by Full Circle Productions and ETR Associates. 

      Other Scholarly Activities      

2017   Keynote: Keynote: "Women in Computer Science: The University Setting." Given at START Informatik: How to Improve Frist Year Teaching in Computer Science at University at Technische Universitat Wien, Austria. March 13-14, 2017.  (Mar 13 2017) INVITED    

2015   Workshop Session: Jill Denner, Yasmin Kafai, and Linda Werner. "Revolutionize Your Computing Competitions and Tournaments to Increase Diversity." National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Summit, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.   (May 20 2015) INVITED