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Harvesting tweets for a better understanding of Engineering Students' First-Year Experiences

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Conference

2020 First-Year Engineering Experience

Location

East Lansing, Michigan

Publication Date

July 26, 2020

Start Date

July 26, 2020

End Date

July 28, 2020

Page Count

7

DOI

10.18260/1-2--35771

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/35771

Download Count

308

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Paper Authors

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Sherif Abdelhamid Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Dr. Sherif E. Abdelhamid served as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the College of Computing and Information Technology (CCIT). Before joining CCIT in 2018, he was an Infrastructure Software Engineer at the Center for Open Science, Virginia, USA.

He obtained his Ph.D. and MSc in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and his current research work lies at the intersection of computation and education. In particular, he is interested in building and evaluating software systems that enrich the students’ learning environment and promote their success.

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Mona Aly Arab Academy for Science,Technology and Maritime Transport

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Mona obtained her MSc and BSc in Electronics and Communication, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport. Her research interests include social networks, and algorithms, wireless and mobile communications, wireless sensor networks, and QoS provisioning in wireless networks.

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Andrew Katz Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Andrew Katz is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech.

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Abstract

Twitter, a popular social networking and microblogging platform, harvests and stores large amounts of data about myriad topics through millions of short messages (tweets). Among this array of topics, some tweets can contain valuable information related to engineering education and first-year engineering experiences. Unfortunately, despite the existence of such related tweets, the engineering education community writ large typically does not have adequate background and statistics on their number and content in order to glean information from this corpus of tweets. In general, data from tweets can be very useful for both qualitative and quantitative studies focusing on first-year engineering experiences. By incorporating data collected from Twitter, we can have the opportunity to discover interesting patterns and themes. In this paper, we report on the results of a study in which we collected and analyzed tweets related to engineering education and first-year engineering experiences. Additionally, we present the implemented pipeline used in our study. The pipeline uses the Twitter application programming interface (API) to pull tweets that contain specific key terms related to our topic of interest and then extracts the tweet content along with other metadata before storing the information in a central online database. Researchers can have access to a web-based interface where they can use the harvested tweets in their studies and get the latest tweets and news feeds.

Abdelhamid, S., & Aly, M., & Katz, A. (2020, July), Harvesting tweets for a better understanding of Engineering Students' First-Year Experiences Paper presented at 2020 First-Year Engineering Experience, East Lansing, Michigan. 10.18260/1-2--35771

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