Paul Denny

I teach introductory computer science and computer programming in the Faculties of Science and Engineering at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. I am currently on research leave, visiting UBC in Vancouver (March-May) and UCSD in San Diego (June-August) 2009.

When I am in Auckland, my contact details are:

     email:paul@cs.auckland.ac.nz
     phone:+64 9 3737599 xtn. 87087
     office:Room 465, Computer Science Building, City Campus
     mail: Department of Computer Science
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland, New Zealand.

Teaching

I have been teaching in a variety of contexts at the University of Auckland since 2000. Most of my teaching is in large classes, often up to 500 students, and I enjoy the associated challenges of teaching in such a diverse environment. I am a member of the Computer Science Department's Education Research group, which is a part of the Software Engineering Research Group (SERG). I am also a member of the ACM Special Interest Group on CS Education.

I am interested in effective ways of engaging students in contribution based collaborative learning. Involving students in community oriented activities, in which they are responsible for creating and sharing learning resources, can be an effective way to promote deep learning and to help develop metacognitive skills. I created the PeerWise web-based learning tool to support this approach.

I am a recipient of the 2004 Faculty of Science Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching and the 2008 University of Auckland Teaching Excellence Award.

Publications

  • Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, John Hamer and Helen Purchase. "Coverage of course topics in a student generated MCQ repository". In ITiCSE'09: Proceedings of the 14th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science, pages (to appear), Paris, France, July 2009. ACM.
  • Elizabeth Godfrey, Rosalind Archer, Paul Denny, Margaret Hyland, Chris Smaill, Karl Stol, "Innovation and Integration in an In-House First-Year Engineering Program: A Fast Track to Engineering Enculturation", American Society for Engineering Education Conference 2009, pages (to appear), Austin, Texas, June 2009
  • John Hamer, Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, John Hosking, and Beryl Plimmer. "Aropä and PeerWise: Supporting student contributed pedagogy in large classes". EDUCAUSE Australasia 2009, pages (to appear), Perth, WA, Australia, May 2009
  • Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and Beth Simon. "Quality of student contributed questions using PeerWise". In M. Hamilton and T. Clear, editors, Eleventh Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2009), volume 95 of CRPIT, pages (to appear), Wellington, New Zealand, 2009. ACS.
  • Andrew Luxton-Reilly and Paul Denny. "A simple framework for arcade games in CS1". In SIGCSE'09: Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, pages 216-220, Chattanooga, TN, USA, 2009. ACM.
  • Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and John Hamer. "Tools that support contribution-based pedagogies". In Proceedings of the ACM-IFIP IEEIII 2008 Informatics Education Europe III Conference, page (to appear), Venice, Italy, December 2008
  • Paul Denny, John Hamer, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and Helen Purchase. "PeerWise: Students sharing their multiple choice questions". In Fourth International Computing Education Research Workshop (ICER 2008), pages 51-58, Sydney, Australia, September 2008.
  • Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and Beth Simon. "Evaluating a new exam question: Parsons Problems". In Fourth International Computing Education Research Workshop (ICER 2008), pages 113-124, Sydney, Australia, September 2008.
  • Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and John Hamer. "The PeerWise system of student contributed assessment questions". In Simon and M. Hamilton, editors, Tenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2008), volume 78 of CRPIT, pages 69-74, Wollongong, NSW, Australia, 2008. ACS.
  • Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and John Hamer. "Student use of the PeerWise system". In ITiCSE'08: Proceedings of the 13th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science, pages 73-77, Madrid, Spain, 2008. ACM.
  • Paul Denny, Rudolf Mathon. "A census of t-(t+8, t+2, 4) designs, 2 <= t <= 4". J. Stat. Plan. Inf. 106, 5-19, 2002.
  • Paul Denny, Peter Gibbons. "Case studies and new results in combinatorial enumeration". J. Combin. Des. 8, no. 4, 239-260, 2000.