Computer science courses employ a variety of assignment deadline policies ranging from strict policies where no late submissions are accepted to flexible policies where extensions, sometimes lengthy ones, are permitted without grade penalty. Many instructors have moved towards increased flexibility for students to alleviate pressure, help students succeed, and better manage the administrative burden of granting extensions. Using data from eight offerings of three computer science courses, we compare assignment submission rates and times as well as course outcomes under different deadline policies. We also compare how similar deadline policies were used by students in different courses, including first- and upper-year courses.

Sense of belonging has been shown to be important for student persistence and success in computer science. A student's sense of belonging is related to a variety of factors, including gender, prior programming experience, first generation status, and elements of the learning environment. Prior work has also shown that competitive admission processes have a negative impact on student sense of belonging. This paper explores sense of belonging of students who enter a computer science major through either a direct or competitive admission pathway. We look at how admission pathway, prior programming experience, and self-identification as a minority in computer science affect sense of belonging for these students. We find that sense of belonging does not differ in a significant way between admission pathways, however prior experience and self-identification as a minority do affect sense of belonging.

In the context of problem sets in first- and second-year computer science theory courses, we investigate the factors influencing students' decisions to work individually or in a small group. Through analysis of open-ended survey responses from over 1,300 students, we have gained a more nuanced understanding of these factors. We observed three categories of factors: workload and time management, optimizing learning and assignment marks, and social and affective factors. We identified two modifiers, online learning and previous group experiences, that amplify the impact of factors in the three main categories. We highlight notable student quotations and discuss barriers to group formation.

We investigate the impact of allowing students to optionally work in small groups on problem sets in first- and second-year computer science theory courses. After each homework assignment, students reported on their experience working on that problem set either individually or in a group of two or three. Over 1,300 students from two courses participated. We explore who chooses to work in a group and why, how students work in groups, and differences in learning, drop-rates, help-seeking, and satisfaction with problem set submissions between groups and students working individually.

As with many other institutions, there is currently far more student interest in our undergraduate Computer Science major than we can accommodate. Our institution limits the capacity of the Computer Science major and uses a competitive, grades-based admission process for students to gain admission at the end of their first year of study. This competitive admission process has had a notable negative impact on the student experience in first-year, as students are especially driven to earn top grades. The competition also encourages students to prioritize academics over everything else.

This report documents the implementation of a self-paced, mastery learning inspired CS1 course. The course was designed to increase the completion rates observed in flipped and online CS1 formats already offered at our institution. We explore the experience of students in the course and evaluate performance outcomes using grade data from all three CS1 formats, student survey responses, and exit interviews. Our evaluation identifies three main challenges in our implementation. First, the course requires significant resources and administering it is significantly more time consuming for instructors than a regular course. Second, students hesitated to treat mastery quizzes as formative. Finally, the flexibility that the course provided, with little structure and few incentives to help students stay on track, led to considerable procrastination. These factors combined to lead students to delay coursework until the end of the semester -- and beyond. As a result, while our data shows an increase in completion relative to the online format, we saw no change in completion relative to the flipped CS1 offering and saw no change in student performance as evaluated by a final exam. However, students reported more deep engagement with and understanding of the material, which encourages us to further develop the course.

Studies in other disciplines demonstrate that writing summaries of videos or readings is an effective strategy for increasing student understanding. We explore a related strategy in computer science where we ask students to write explanations of program behaviour. Our experiments are conducted through an online application used by students to prepare for class by watching videos and solving follow-up exercises. With students randomly assigned to treatment groups, we evaluate the effect of different kinds of video follow-up questions by analyzing pre- and post-performance on subsequent select-all-that-apply multiple-choice questions. In experiment one, we found no difference in post-performance between students who wrote explanations and those who were not asked to do so. When the same prompt for explanations was accompanied by a motivational sentence, the quality of the student answers increased, but post-performance was unchanged. In a second experiment, students received either no experimental questions, questions requiring a written explanation or short-answer questions with a single correct response. Again, we found no difference in post-performance across the different treatments. This non-significant result might be explained by the post-performance question difficulty -- the question might not be hard enough to reveal differences in understanding. The question timing might also be a factor, since students complete all the questions soon after watching the video and there may not be enough time for students to need the extra retention benefit gained by doing the experimental questions.

We report our experience developing and teaching a computing elective course for students enrolled in a Doctor of Medicine (MD) program. Students participated in a series of workshops to learn and practice programming, and gained additional experience by completing programming assignments. Students then participated in a novel seminar series delivered by experts who each discussed one application of computing to medicine. Each seminar included a corresponding programming project where students worked with the ideas introduced in the seminar and practiced their newly-acquired programming skills. We found that by streaming the students into levels based on prior experience, carefully scaffolding project handouts, and having each seminar co-led by a faculty member, we are able to support students --- even beginners --- to succeed. Students report that the topics are relevant, they appreciate the medical context of the programming exercises, and they would recommend the program to others.

With growing enrolment and ongoing research into best practices for team work, many instructors are rethinking how to form, evaluate, and manage teams. In this BoF, instructors will discuss the strategies they have employed, the effectiveness of those approaches, and the tools that support administering teams. Discussion topics may include self- and peer-evaluation, grading strategies, software support, and conflict resolution.

Enrollment in post-secondary online courses has been increasing, but several studies have found that the drop rates in online courses are higher than in face-to-face. In our previous study comparing an online section of CS1 with a face-to-face flipped section, we also found the drop rate higher in the online section. Given that we plan to continue offering online options for our students, we aim to identify factors associated with success in online CS1. In this paper, we examine factors that are under students' own control such as how fully they participate in ungraded but important learning activities, and other factors that we may be able to manipulate and improve, such as students' skills for self-regulated learning, and their sense of community in the course. We found important differences between the online and flipped sections regarding what behaviours and attributes were associated with success. While completion of unmarked practice exercises was a factor for both sections, test anxiety and self-efficacy were factors only for the online section, and intrinsic goal orientation was a factor only for the flipped section.

No abstract available.

"Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." - Proverb In 2005, computing education was experiencing a crisis. Enrollments had "fallen to such an extent that some academic computing programs were facing significant reductions in staffing levels or even elimination". The community responded, with panels to investigate and highlight ways to infuse "passion, beauty, joy and awe" into the introductory experiences, the CS10K project to bring computing to 10,000 teachers and 100,000 students, and better messaging of career opportunities, to name a few of the initiatives to bring students back into our seats.

When students can choose to take a course online or face-to-face, who chooses each format? Why do students select one format instead of the other? We compare an online section of CS1 to a concurrent face-to-face section and find that the populations in the two sections are very different. In particular, students in the online section have less prior programming experience and are less likely to intend to major in computer science. We also examine the reasons why students choose their section, many of which relate to convenience, desire for interaction with others, and degree of familiarity with the course material. Finally, we compare course outcomes for the two sections. We find significant differences in drop rates, but not in final exam scores. We investigate whether the differences we find can be explained by differences in the populations who choose to take the course online vs face-to-face.

The subject of this work is evaluation methods of student software development team projects. Over a two year period in three courses, we study student preferences for team evaluation methods, the reasons behind their preferences, the changes in preference that occur within a single course and across courses, and misconceptions that educators hold about student preferences.

We report on our experience with incorporating Android software development in a second-year software design course. Our primary course goals are twofold: (1) teach principles of object-oriented design, and provide students with an opportunity to apply these principles in designing and developing Java programs, and (2) introduce students to the basics of software engineering with a team project that follows a Scrum-like software development process. In this report, we describe a team-based Android application development project that achieves our teaching goals, helps motivate student learning, and increases student satisfaction with the course. We provide an overview of our approach, outcomes, and student feedback. We also describe lessons learnt by the instructors and identify promising directions for improvements.

Project experience and teamwork have been identified as two of the most important deficiencies of recent graduates, so experiences with team projects are a critical component of computer science and software engineering education. However, evaluating these projects is difficult, as it requires a balance between rewarding the team's effort (and the development of skills that enable the team to work effectively) and recognizing individual contributions. We report on an investigation of the student perspective on evaluation of software development team projects. We find that (1) computer science and software engineering educators hold several misconceptions about students' preferences in teamwork evaluation methods, (2) that students' preferences with regard to evaluation change dramatically as they advance through the program and even in the course of a single term, and (3) that the change in preference occurs early in the term, before they complete any work as a team, with most students shifting their preference towards putting more weight on the team's effort.

The inverted or flipped classroom has been shown to be effective in computer science. Inverted teaching depends on students engaging in both pre- and in-lecture activities. What reward structure will motivate students to do so? We report on our experience with inverted teaching for a one-month unit in a third-year database course.

We compare a traditional CS1 offering with an inverted offering delivered the following year to a comparable student population. We measure student attitudes, grades, and final course outcomes and find that, while students in the inverted offering do not report increased enjoyment and are no more likely to pass, learning as measured by final exam performance increases significantly. This increase is not simply a function of a more onerous inverted offering, as students report spending similar time per week in the traditional and inverted offerings. Contrary to our hypotheses, however, we find no evidence that the the inverted offering disproportionally helps beginners or those not fully fluent in English.

This case study explores an inverted classroom offering of an introductory programming course (CS1). Students prepared for lecture by watching short lecture videos and completing required in-video quiz questions. During lecture, the students worked through exercises with the support of the instructor and teaching assistants. We describe the course implementation and its assessment, including pre- and post-course surveys. We also discuss lessons learned, modifications that we plan to make for the next offering, and recommendations for others teaching inverted courses.

In his keynote at SIGCSE 2007, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing. This led to a series of room-packed sessions at the following six SIGCSE symposia to explore that idea from different angles. They have provided a forum for sharing: What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to trumpet. What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our curriculum is lacking in PBJA, and how to fix it. How we should do it (pedagogy): Sharing how a change in attitude / focus / etc. can make strides to improving PBJA.

This work explores the effects of prior exposure to programming on student experiences in an introductory computer programming course CS1). We take a student-focused approach: using a combination of surveys and semi-structured interviews, we obtain information on the student experiences in CS1 and their relationship to prior programming experience (PE). The analysis of the results provides insight into the following two questions: a) How does PE affect peer interaction: pair programming sessions, assignment partnerships, and online and in-class interactions? b) What are the students' beliefs on the relationship between PE and success in the course?

This article presents “Islands,” an interactive graphical interface for construction, modification, and management of queries during a search session on a bibliographic database. The Islands interface is compared to the Dialog Interface™ on a search of the INSPEC database.