Alexander Steinmaurer - Academic Website

Hi, I am Alex Steinmaurer, Study Program Coordinator of the Ph.D. Program “Digital Transformation in Learning” and Post Doc (“Computing Education”) at IT:U Austria, a newly founded interdisciplinary university in Linz, Austria. I’m also an adjunct fellow at the Cognitive and Digital Science Lab at Graz University of Technology. I obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Faculty of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering at Graz University of Technology under the supervision of Christian Gütl.

During the fall semester of 2023, I worked as a Research Fellow at the PLT Group of Brown University. I worked on approaches and tools to rethink data science/programming education in times of LLMs, advised by Shriram Krishnamurthi and Kathi Fisler.

Teaching

During my academic career, I had the opportunity to give many different lectures and courses. I gave courses at Graz University of Technology, FH Campus 02, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, and University College of Teacher Education Styria.

I am especially proud that the courses Introduction to Programming and Object-oriented Programming 1 were nominated (and short-listed) twice for the Excellence in Teaching Award from TU Graz. In 2022/23 the course Object-oriented Programming 1 was finally awarded with the prize. We presented our teaching concept for the course in a poster.

Courses

Supervising

I also had the honor to work with talented Bachelor and Master students and (co-)supervise their thesis:

Current Ph.D. Students I am currently (co-)supervising the following Ph.D. students:

Former Master Students

Former Bachelor Students

Research

Reserach Vision

Motivated by Shriram Krishnamurthi, I strongly favor having a reserach vision rather than a narrowly defined reserach area. My scientific “home base” lies at the intersection of technology and education, constituting the core of my research endeavors. Since Data affects my everyday life, my reserach vision turns around data:

Data is omnipresent, people generate it every day; it depicts our complex reality. Learning is ubiquitous; people learn every day; it is the basis for positive change. How can data and learning be linked to bring positive change?

My research interests are mainly in the field of Computer Science Education. Here is a list of topics that I am interested in:

Research projects

This (non-exhaustive) list of my latest (reserach) projects shows what I am interested in:

Publications

I maintain my publications within a Google Docs publication list

Before that, I liked to use Research Gate for a while to manage all my publications. But as with almost every social network, it requires quite active maintenance, which takes some time. Even though RG has some good functionality to support you as much as possible, I ended up using mainly Google Scholar instead. There you can find all my (recent) papers.

Working with me?

If you are interested in my research area and would like to discuss your ideas for a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis, I would love to hear from you - drop me an email (alexander.steinmaurer@it-u.at). Ensure that this email also contains some first serious thoughts on the topic, including an interesting problem/question you would like to answer (you do not have to come up with a solution/implementation, a good question is a perfect starting point!)

Useful Resources