Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

It is my pleasure to welcome you to this issue of the International Journal of Secondary Computing and Applications Research (IJSCAR). The five articles gathered here reflect just how wide the reach of student-led computing research has become, spanning mobile sensing and on-device machine learning for at-home physical rehabilitation, reproducible data-engineering pipelines for behavioral survey research, lightweight transformer models for mental health text triage, the cognitive science of active versus passive learning, and lightweight machine learning for IoT intrusion detection.

Taken together, these papers show a maturing research instinct: a willingness to engage seriously with real deployment constraints, not just idealized benchmarks. Several authors in this issue built and tested working prototypes on actual hardware, released reproducible software artifacts alongside their write-ups, or ran adversarial and sensitivity checks on their own results rather than reporting a single favorable configuration. That kind of self-scrutiny is exactly what distinguishes rigorous research from a class project, and it is heartening to see it appear so consistently at the secondary level.

The diversity of domains represented here, health technology, data engineering, natural language processing, learning science, and cybersecurity, also speaks to something IJSCAR has long believed: that computing research is not a single narrow track but a set of tools and habits of mind that students bring to bear on whatever problem captures their curiosity. Whether that problem is a patient’s rehabilitation exercises, a classroom’s learning outcomes, or a network’s exposure to attack, the underlying discipline of careful measurement, honest reporting of limitations, and reproducible methodology remains the same.

As always, I want to thank our authors for the care they put into this work, their mentors and teachers for the guidance behind the scenes, and our reviewers for the time they gave to strengthening each submission. It is a genuine privilege to help bring this research to a wider audience.

We hope this issue informs and inspires, and we look forward to sharing the next chapter of student computing research with you soon.

Sincerely,

Maria Hwang

Editor-in-Chief