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BRIDGES is a software framework for creating engaging assignments for required courses such as data structures and algorithms. It provides students with a simplified API that populates their own data structure implementations with live and real-world data, and provides the ability for students to easily visualize the data structures they create as part of routine classroom exercises. The objective is to use the infrastructure to promote a better understanding of the data structure and its underlying algorithms. This report describes the BRIDGES infrastructure and provides evaluation data collected over the first five years of the project. In the first 2 years, as we were developing the BRIDGES projects, our focus was on gathering data to assess whether the addition of the BRIDGES exercises had an effect on student retention of core concepts in data structures; and throughout the 5-year duration of the project, student interest and faculty feedback were collected online and anonymously. A mixed method design was used to evaluate the project impact. A quasiexperimental design compared student cohorts who were enrolled in comparable course sections that used BRIDGES with those that did not. Qualitative and quantitative measures were developed and used together with course grades and grade point averages. Interest and relevance in BRIDGES programming assignments was assessed with additional survey data from students and instructors. Results showed that students involved in BRIDGES projects demonstrated larger gains in knowledge of data structures compared to students enrolled in comparable course sections, as well as long-term benefits in their performance in four follow-on required courses. Survey responses indicated that some investment of time was needed to use BRIDGES, but the extra efforts were associated with several notable outcomes. Students and instructors had positive perceptions of the value of engaging in BRIDGES projects. BRIDGES can become a tool to get students more engaged in critical foundational courses, demonstrating relevance and context to today’s computational challenges. 

Although undergraduate enrollment in Computer Science has remained strong and seen substantial increases in the past decade, retention of majors remains a significant concern, particularly for students at the freshman and sophomore level that are tackling foundational courses on algorithms and data structures. In this work, we present BRIDGES, a software infrastructure designed to enable the creation of more engaging assignments in introductory data structures courses by providing students with a simplified API that allows them to populate their own data structure implementations with live, real-world, and interesting data sets, such as those from popular social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook). BRIDGES also provides the ability for students to create and explore {\em visualizations} of the execution of the data structures that they construct in their course assignments, which can promote better understanding of the data structure and its underlying algorithms; these visualizations can be easily shared via a weblink with peers, family, and instructional staff. In this paper, we present the BRIDGES system, its design, architecture and its use in our data structures course over two semesters.