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Title: Retaining and Engaging CS Majors Using BRIDGES
In this poster we present BRIDGES, a software infrastructure for programming assignments in data structures and algorithms courses, that has been in use at multiple institutions over the past 2 years. BRIDGES was developed to engage students at the sophomore level in critical foundational courses, to improve retention and reduce attrition rates. BRIDGES provides two key capabilities: (1) easy to use interface to real world datasets spanning social networks, entertainment (movies on IMDB, song lyrics), scientific data (real-time USGIS Earthquake Data), civic issues (crime data), and literature (books); and (2) a visualization of the acquired data can be used in assignments by students to populate their implemented data structures, including the capability to bring out attributes of the dataset. The visualizations are displayed on the BRIDGES website and are easily shared (with family, friends, peers, etc) via a weblink. Visitors will see several example datasets being used in data structure visualizations using BRIDGES, and see how BRIDGES can be used in their own courses, as well as partner with the BRIDGES team.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1245841
NSF-PAR ID:
10091594
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (NSF Showcase)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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