Analogies and metaphors are ubiquitous in computing education, helping instructors break down complex or abstract ideas by connecting them to familiar experiences. This Birds of a Feather session invites educators from across the CS curriculum—from introductory through advanced courses—to share ''sticky'' analogies: explanations that clarify challenging concepts and remain memorable for students. Facilitators will begin with a small set of example analogies that illustrate how to articulate a learning goal, map each component of the analogy to the target concept, and identify any needed cultural or background knowledge. The floor will then open for attendees to contribute analogies that have either worked well for them or fallen flat, enabling collective reflection on what makes an analogy effective or ineffective. A shared document will be collaboratively built during the session so attendees can take away new analogies, refine existing ones, and continue contributing after the symposium.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many courses were forced to move to online teaching and assessments. This paper compares student performance in four offerings of a CS0 course, two of which were fully online (including un-proctored online assessments), and two of which were offered in a hybrid manner, with proctored in-person assessments. Comparing students' performance on identical exam questions across the four course offerings revealed that students generally scored far better on the un-proctored online assessments than the proctored in-person assessments. The largest differences were generally observed for questions that only required students to recall statements that were included on the provided lecture slides, or were written on the slides by the course instructor as the material was taught.

This nifty assignment describes two interrelated image compression problems: implementing an image decoder and implementing an image encoder. These tasks introduce students to three elementary data compression techniques in a fun way, and bring some relatively recent work on image compression into the first-year classroom. Students work with images stored in text files in the OK Text Image format; a format that was developed for this assignment based on the Quite OK Image format published in 2021. In this format, some pixels are represented directly as a collection of red, green and blue values. Others are represented more compactly as a difference from the immediately preceding pixel, as a copy of a pixel that has been encountered previously, or as a run of several identical pixels. An assortment of contrived images is provided, each of which uses only a subset of the three compression approaches, along with several 'real' images that combine all three approaches. This allows students to focus on each pixel type independently as they create their programs, while also forcing them to consider the interactions between the different pixel types in the 'real' images. Each problem was used successfully with CS1 students who implemented their solutions in Python.

The Nifty Assignments special session is about sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments.

The Nifty Assignments special session is about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments.

Parsons Problems are code rearrangement problems that can be used to assess students' programming ability. Our work builds on previous studies involving Parsons Problems by showing that it was possible to have students encode the solution to a Parsons Problem on a special purpose bubble sheet. This allowed students to answer Parsons Problems in a traditional paper-based exam environment while also allowing their responses to be scanned and scored automatically. The nature of the special purpose bubble sheet is described, as is the proof-of-concept software that was developed to analyze the bubble sheets, evaluate the student responses, and distribute the graded responses back to the students. Written feedback received from students on end-of-course surveys showed that the vast majority of students considered electronically scorable Parsons Problems to be a fair and reasonable evaluation technique in a large introductory course, and only minimal concerns were raised about the need to record their solutions on a bubble sheet.

The Nifty Assignments special session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments. Each presenter will introduce their assignment, give a quick demo, and describe its niche in the curriculum and its strengths and weaknesses. The presentations (and the descriptions below) merely introduce the assignment. A key part of Nifty Assignments is the mundane but vital role of distributing the materials - handouts, data files, starter code, rubrics - that make each assignment ready to adopt. Each assignment presented has complete materials freely available on the Nifty Assignments home page nifty.stanford.edu. If you have an assignment that works well and would be of interest to the CSE community, please consider applying to present at Nifty Assignments.

This experience report describes a faculty member's effort to create educational videos that support students' learning in a programming intensive CS1 class, along with an evaluation of their use by students. The videos that were created were supplementary in nature, providing students with an optional opportunity to go back and re-watch live coding demonstrations performed in class. The production process used to create the videos is described, along with several lessons learned during this undertaking. Student usage data is reported, along with survey results collected from 164 students. Survey results show that a strong majority of students who watched the videos believed that the videos helped them learn the material in the course. Several risks that should be considered before creating custom programming video content for a course are also discussed.

I suspect that students learn more from our programming assignments than from our much worried-over lectures, with their slide transitions and attempts at live coding in lecture. A great assignment is deliberate about where the student hours go, concentrating the student's attention on material that is interesting and useful. The best assignments solve a problem that is topical and entertaining, providing motivation for the whole stack of work. Unfortunately, creating great programming assignments is both time consuming and error prone. The Nifty Assignments special session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments.

An exam wrapper is a structured activity that students engage in after their instructor has graded and returned an exam, and is designed to promote self-reflection and improve study practices. This paper describes two studies examining the efficacy and student perceptions of exam wrappers. The studies were conducted at two major Canadian universities, using complementary research designs. We report that neither study produced evidence that exam wrappers have a significant effect on final exam scores or on course drop rates. However, we also find that the use of wrappers was associated with improved rates of test pickup and increased scores on a course evaluation question regarding the fairness of evaluation methods. Given these results, we advise instructors who are considering the use of exam wrappers to review the evidence for other possible interventions that may more effectively serve the same goals.

The task of determining which LEGO bricks to use to construct a volume is known as the LEGO Construction Problem. This is a challenging problem because even small volumes can be constructed in a tremendously large number of ways. As a result, an exhaustive search is impractical, and more nuanced search strategies must be employed to find a good, though not necessarily optimal, solution. This paper describes a multi-phase search approach to the LEGO Construction Problem. Our first search phase uses heuristics to identify a moderate number of candidates for each layer in the model. This is followed by two different search strategies which identify alternative brick arrangements that reduce the number of connected components, undesirable edges, and bricks in the model. A final highly localized search is applied to bricks at the boundaries between the model's connected components if the previous search processes fail to reduce the model to a single connected component. Applying this four-phase search strategy to a diverse selection of models has demonstrated that it normally finds a result that consists of a single connected component when such a solution exists, and that the models are structurally sound when built.

Because recursion is generally introduced early in the curriculum, the range of problems that can be used to motivate its study is limited. We describe three interesting visual problems that use recursion effectively. Each problem demonstrates the utility of recursion in an engaging way while being appropriate for students nearing the end of CS1.

This paper describes a new tool for introducing computer graphics and multimedia applications into first year, called QuickDraw, and our experience using it. QuickDraw provides an easy to use language and platform independent interface which permits students to create multimedia applications beginning with their first assignment in an introductory computer science course. QuickDraw has been carefully designed to avoid complex "magical" statements in order to setup, use, or tear down the multimedia environment, making it an appropriate tool for use with students with no prior programming experience. As instructors, we have found that QuickDraw effectively engages students by allowing them to create visually impressive programs with minimal complexity, while continuing to allow us to effectively teach fundamental computer science concepts.