skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: High School BRIDGES: Visualizations of Data, Data Structures, and More
HS BRIDGES (https://bridgesuncc.github.io/bridges-hs/) is a collection of programming projects, including "student scaffolds" and "teacher walkthroughs", that use UNC Charlotte's BRIDGES Java Libraries (https://bridgesuncc.github.io/) in order to enable students' creations of data structure- and real world data visualizations. In this Demo, we show sample projects from the HS BRIDGES collection (https://bridgesuncc.github.io/bridges-hs/). We discuss the pedagogy behind the design of our instructional materials, the importance of our "teacher walkthroughs" as supports for teachers who are new to computer science OR who are new to teaching, and the meaningful learning outcomes that students achieve as they solve project problems. Programming agility and understanding of data structures flourish when engaging problem solving challenges, scaffolded learning materials, and dynamic visualizations converge. Overall, we aim to engage session participants with HS BRIDGES projects during the session, and then back home with their students. We've recently published our collection via the Web and we are eager to share the joy of cool visualizations that make data come alive. This work is supported by NSF TUES and NSF IUSE.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1726809
PAR ID:
10344692
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Volume:
2
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1178 to 1178
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)
    Many high school mathematics teachers have stepped up to the charge of learning computer science and offering CS courses to their students. As CS grows in popularity, more students are completing AP CS A as sophomores or juniors, and looking for advanced opportunities while still in high school. Our project seeks to support high school teachers in their quests to meet students' needs for advanced CS coursework. I am one such teacher who faced that need, and was relieved to find the BRIDGES libraries and projects repository website for CS college professors. I began the work of adapting their data structures related projects for use in my courses. Solving Java programming challenges using BRIDGES libraries has helped my students visualize and program with one- and two-dimensional arrays and linked lists. In this talk, we encourage/recruit high school teachers to try our adapted-for-high-school BRIDGES materials, and share in the joy of cool visualizations that make data structures come alive. Using one sample project, I will show how an engaging problem, scaffolded learning materials, and dynamic visualizations converge to facilitate student understanding of, and programming agility with, two-dimensional arrays. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; (, Science and Children)
    This article portrays how citizen science (CS) projects can be integrated into elementary classrooms to enhance students’ sensemaking skills and connect to real-world science problems. For the last several years, we have been involved in a study, Teacher Learning for Effective School-Based Citizen Science (TL4CS), that developed materials for elementary school teachers to engage their students in data collection, analysis, and interpretation for two existing CS projects: Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) and the Lost Ladybug Project (LLP). After piloting the TL4CS materials for two years, two teachers, Penny and Amy, share the ways they used the materials to create rich sensemaking experiences for their students. Penny used our TL4CS CoCoRaHS materials to make connections between their daily precipitation data and local weather phenomena, patterns in ecosystems, and student-created graphs. Amy used our TL4CS LLP materials to explore students’ questions about human impact on animals’ habitats and discover the importance of biodiversity in ecosystems. As demonstrated by Penny’s and Amy’s stories, the TL4CS materials can transform mere data collection for CS projects into opportunities for real-world connections and sensemaking in science classrooms. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; (, Frontiers in education)
    IntroductionElementary teachers face many challenges when including reform-based science instruction in their classrooms, and some teachers have chosen to enhance their science instruction by introducing students to citizen science (CS) projects. When CS projects are incorporated in formal school settings, students have an opportunity to engage in real-world projects as they collect and make sense of data, yet relatively few CS projects offer substantial guidance for teachers seeking to implement the projects, placing a heavy burden on teacher learning. MethodsFramed in theory on teacher relationships with curricula, we prepared science standards-aligned educative support materials for two CS projects. We present convergent mixed methods research that examines two teachers’ contrasting approaches to including school-based citizen science (SBCS) in their fifth-grade classrooms, each using support materials for one of the two CS projects. Both are veteran teachers at under-resourced Title 1 (an indicator of the high percentage of the students identified as economically disadvantaged) rural schools in the southeastern United States. We document the teachers’ interpretations and use of SBCS materials for the CS projects with data from classroom observations, instructional logs, teacher interviews, and student focus groups. ResultsOne teacher adapted the materials to include scaffolding to position students for success in data collection and analysis. In contrast, the second teacher adapted the SBCS support materials to maintain a teacher-centered approach to instruction, identifying perceptions of students’ limited abilities and limited instructional time as constraining factors. DiscussionWe discuss the intersection of CS projects in formal education and opportunities for engaging students in authentic science data collection, analysis, and sense-making. The two teachers’ stories identify the influences of school context and the need for teacher support to encourage elementary teachers’ use of SBCS instruction to supplement their science instruction. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, ACM SIGCSE 2016)
    This demo introduces participants to the concepts and application of BRIDGES, a software infrastructure designed to facilitate hands-on experience for solving traditional problems in introductory computer science courses using data from real-world systems that are of interest to students, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Maps. BRIDGES provides access to real-world data sets for use in traditional data structures programming assignments, without requiring students to work with complex and varied APIs to acquire such data. BRIDGES also helps the students to explore and understand the use of data structures by providing each student with a visualization of operations performed on the student's own implementation of a data structure. BRIDGES visualizations can be easily shared (via a weblink) with peers, friends, and family. Demo attendees will see (and possibly engage in) hands-on experience with BRIDGES and will have the opportunity to discuss how BRIDGES can be used to support various introductory computer science courses. Additionally, the demo will complement our oral presentation of our work at SIGCSE, by providing hands-on demonstrations of BRIDGES. 
    more » « less
  5. (, Journal of Computer Science in Colleges (Central Plains))
    The rise in CS enrollments in the past few years has also resulted in a more diverse population of learners that have different expectations, motivations and interests, making it important to provide relevant learning materials in early foundational courses. Grounding Computer Science concepts in reality by solving important real-world or fun problems are keys to increasing students’ motivation and engagement in computing, which may help improve student retention and success. This workshop provides instructors with a hands-on introduction to BRIDGES, a software infrastructure for programming assignments in early computer science courses, such as CS1, CS2, data structures, and algorithm analysis. BRIDGES provides the tools for creating engaging programming assignments, including: (1) a simplified API for accessing real-world data, such as those from social networks, entertainment (songs, movies), science, engineering (USGIS Earthquakes, elevation maps), geography (OpenStreet maps), and literature (Project Gutenberg), (2) creating visualizations of the data, (3) an easy to use API for game-based assignments, and, (4) algorithm benchmarking. Workshop attendees will engage in hands-on experience using BRIDGES with multiple datasets, have the opportunity to discuss the challenges they face in their own courses, and how BRIDGES can be used in their own courses. Using BRIDGES in data structures, algorithms, and other courses have shown improved retention of CS knowledge and better student performance in follow-on courses, when compared to students from other sections of the same course. BRIDGES has impacted nearly 2000 students across 20 institutions since its inception 5 years ago. A repository of BRIDGES assignments is now maintained for instructors using BRIDGES in their classes. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email