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The NSF/IEEE-TCPP Parallel and Distributed Computing curriculum guidelines released in 2012 (PDC12) is an effort to bring more parallel computing education to early computer science courses. It has been moderately successful, with the inclusion of some PDC topics in the ACM/IEEE Computer Science curriculum guidelines in 2013 (CS13) and some coverage of topics in early CS courses in some universities in the U.S. and around the world. A reason often cited for the lack of a broader adoption is the difficulty for instructors who are not already knowledgable in PDC topics to learn how to teach those topics and alignmore »
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This workshop introduces participants to the concepts and use of BRIDGES, a software infrastructure for programming assignments in data structures and algorithms courses. 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 aremore »
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Many newcomers to programming and computational thinking have been brought up on interactive, gamified learning environments. Introductory computer science courses at the university level need to dig deeper into these topics, but must do so with similarly engaging technologies and projects. To address this need, we have built a framework for a grid-based game API with event-based blocking and continuous non-blocking interfaces. The framework abstracts away much of the complexity of inputs and rendering and exposes a simple game grid similar to a 2D array indexed by rows and columns. As such, our project helps reinforce basic computing concepts (arrays,more »
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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 inmore »
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In recent years, interactive textbooks have gained prominence in an effort to overcome student reluctance to routinely read textbooks, complete assigned homeworks, and to better engage students to keep up with lecture content. Interactive textbooks are more structured, contain smaller amounts of textual material, and integrate media and assessment content. While these are an arguable improvement over traditional methods of teaching, issues of academic integrity and engagement remain. In this work we demonstrate preliminary work on building interactive teaching modules for data structures and algorithms courses with the following characteristics, (1) the modules are highly visual and interactive, (2) trainingmore »
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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).more »
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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 onmore »