Student-generated active-learning exercises

  • Authors:

  • Edward F. Gehringer;Carolyn S. Miller

  • Affiliations:

  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Active-learning exercises are an effective use of class time to bring about desired learning outcomes. Instead of listening to a lecture, students are engaged in tasks that allow them to discover new knowledge, or apply what they have just learned. A barrier to wide usage of active-learning exercises is the need to design them, since few are available in textbooks, technical papers, or on the Web. The work reported in this paper demonstrates that students can design active-learning exercises that are worthy of being used in CS1 and CS2. This frees the instructor from having to write all the exercises him/herself. This paper makes three contributions: a methodology for creating student-generated active-learning exercises, several exercises for teaching difficult concepts in CS1 and CS2, and guidance about the kinds of active-learning exercises that students will enjoy and learn most from.