FIE'09 Proceedings of the 39th IEEE international conference on Frontiers in education conference
Two experiments using learning rate to evaluate an experimenter developed tool for splay trees
Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
Teaching introductory programming with popular board games
Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
A software craftsman's approach to data structures
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
Using mobile phone programming to teach Java and advanced programming to computer scientists
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
RoboLIFT: engaging CS2 students with testable, automatically evaluated android applications
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
Experiments with algorithm visualization tool development
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
CSTutor: a pen-based tutor for data structure visualization
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
How we teach impacts student learning: peer instruction vs. lecture in CS0
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
Retaining nearly one-third more majors with a trio of instructional best practices in CS1
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
Constructive use of errors in teaching CS1
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
On plugging "unplugged" into CS classes
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
A case for course capstone projects in CS1
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
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We report on a study comparing an open-ended freshman-level CS2 project with a fully specified project of similar difficulty. We employed a randomized, controlled trial methodology. The students needed to use similar data structures and algorithms, presented during lectures, for both projects. The first half of the milestones were almost identical for both groups, but the open-ended project asked students to develop a player strategy for a specific board game, while in the other project the students executed the game by communicating with the player modules and verifying the moves against the rules of the game. In the final stages of the project while one group of students worked on honing their own strategy, the other students implemented a pre-specified tie breaking mechanism used when two player strategies tie in a match. At the end of the term, both groups had a friendly tournament: the player strategies faced each other for the ultimate winner while the other group's submissions were ranked by a team of judges based on the implementation's correctness and style. The tournament was just for fun - it did not contribute to the final grade. We hypothesized that the player group would enjoy the project more, would score higher, and would be better motivated and equipped to study computer science. Our study confirmed higher enjoyment and interest of the study group participants. We did not observe statistically significant differences among other measured quantities, or example grade distribution, of the respective groups.