Engaging Programming Assignments to Recruit and Retain CS0 Students
Gina Sprint, Andy O'Fallon · 2018
Many universities offer an optional CS0 course taken prior to traditional CS1 and CS2 courses. Students enrolling in CS0 represent a variety of programming experience levels and majors. To more successfully recruit students to CS0 and retain students as CS majors, it is important to engage students in the course materials early on and frequently. There are several types of course materials (e.g. lesson notes, in class activities) and approaches to design engaging material (e.g. team-based learning, POGIL). In this poster, we focus on programming assignments that incorporate engagement practices put forth by the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT). NCWIT sponsors a program called EngageCSEdu, which is a collection of peer-reviewed introductory CS materials that are contributed by faculty. All materials in the database have demonstrated evidence of NCWIT"s engagement practices. In this poster, we present seven of our programming assignments that have been accepted into the EngageCSEdu database, two of which have won Engagement Excellence awards. The assignments cover the topics in a Python-based CS0 course at Washington State University. The poster presents the assignments, their learning outcomes, and their engagement practices. We include student commentary and examples of student submissions that demonstrate students" interest and creativity. Lastly, we present advertising materials we deployed that showcase the CS0 programming assignments to recruit more students to take the course. The assignments, student examples, and advertising efforts we present offer insights for educators about recruiting, engaging, and retaining students of all majors in introductory CS courses.