Luca Chiodini

About me

Hi! I'm a PhD student in Computer Science Education at USI (Lugano, 🇨🇭). I work at the LuCE research group under the supervision of professor Matthias Hauswirth. In 2023, I spent a semester abroad at Aalto University (🇫🇮) under the supervision of Juha Sorva. While I'm fascinated by many CS topics, I have a particular interest in effective education and good teaching. This curriculum describes my path, in case you are interested.

Contacts

If you want to get in touch, feel free to write an email to luca@chiodini.org.

Publications

• Luca Chiodini, Juha Sorva, Matthias Hauswirth. Teaching Programming with Graphics: Pitfalls and a Solution. SPLASH-E '23. [PDF] [DOI]
• Luca Chiodini, Igor Moreno Santos, Matthias Hauswirth. Expressions in Java: Essential, Prevalent, Neglected?. SPLASH-E '22. [PDF] [DOI]
• Luca Chiodini, Matthias Hauswirth. Wrong Answers for Wrong Reasons: The Risks of Ad Hoc Instruments. Koli Calling '21. [PDF] [DOI]
• Luca Chiodini, Matthias Hauswirth, Andrea Gallidabino. Conceptual Checks for Programming Teachers. EC-TEL '21. [PDF] [DOI]
• Luca Chiodini, Igor Moreno Santos, Andrea Gallidabino, Anya Tafliovich, André L. Santos, Matthias Hauswirth. A Curated Inventory of Programming Language Misconceptions. ITiCSE '21. [PDF] [DOI]

Current and past activities

• I have been part of the technical team behind the Italian and the International Informatics Olympiad in Teams.
• I organized six editions of ABC, an Olympiad-style online programming contest held each year in May.
• In 2017, I participated in the first Italian training program in cybersecurity for students. I placed second in a local final challenge and competed with a team in the national final, held in Rome, ranking second.
• In 2014, I won a bronze medal at the Italian Olympiad in Informatics.

Technical blog posts

• What the global statement really means in Python
• Tutorial on how to create images and GIFs with Asymptote

Resources

Over the years I've created and shared a number of resources (some of them in Italian), which can be browsed at files.chiodini.org. This is a list of the most valuable ones:

• Slides of my presentations to train high school students competing in Olympiad in Informatics: regional selection (years 2018, 2017, 2016) and school selection (years 2018, 2017).
• My Master's degree thesis, done at LuCE Research Lab to better understand misconceptions when learning to program (related slides).
• My Bachelor's degree thesis, done at Information Retrieval Laboratory to work towards an automatic approach to identify potential binge drinkers on Twitter (related slides).
• My high school thesis, which consisted in developing an automated spelling correction system (related slides).
• Theory of computation class notes.
• Calculus 1 class notes.
• Some solved exercises about signal processing.
• An introductory reading about competitive programming for young students.
• A guide for moving the first steps with JFlex, a lexical analyzer generator.