Education
Ph.D., Computer Science, Duke University
M.S., Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University
B.S., Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University
About
My research focuses on computing education. I investigate how learners interact with learning environments, with the ultimate goal of designing environments that better support them. My ongoing line of work characterizes computing students’ academic help-seeking tendencies throughout the curriculum. I am also interested in the effects of innovative and flexible course policies, as well as pedagogy for computing subjects beyond programming.
Research Focus
Computing Education
Publication Highlight
– Shao-Heng Ko and Kristin Stephens-Martinez. 2025. Rethinking Computing Students’ Help Resource Utilization through Sequentiality. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ. 25, 1, Article 7 (March 2025), 34 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3716860
– Shao-Heng Ko, Matthew Zahn, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, Yesenia Velasco, Lina Battestilli, and Sarah Heckman. 2025. Relationships Between Computing Students’ Characteristics, Help-Seeking Approaches, and Help-Seeking Behavior in Introductory Courses and Beyond. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V.1 (ICER ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 313–326. https://doi.org/10.1145/3702652.3744214
– Janet Jiang, Jonathan Liu, Shao-Heng Ko, Diana Franklin, and Kristin Stephens-Martinez. 2026. Adapting an Ecological Belonging Intervention to an Introductory Computer Science Course. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ. 26, 4, Article 78 (December 2026), 22 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3819078