Well rested, it is time for conference again! Keynote today by code.org. When teaching someone programming, you don't tell them this is overloading or this is event handling, but instead the base concept. CS is starting to count for high school graduation requirements at the state level, but districts and universities are slower to change. CSEd Week is Dec 8 - 14 this year, for another Hour of Code. The first one had impressive results (including almost 50/50 male / female ratio) and the key thing is that this hour is providing a foot in the door. So the hour is meant as a just a start and 97% of teachers rated the hour positively.
Adding parallel programming in CS2. Students are taught OpenMP pragmas as applied to for loops. Projects assigned around matrix operations and image processing. Part of the teaching is done through live coding, which is based on demoing patternlets. Students see this component as exciting and fresh. All problems are restricted to those not requiring synchronization. (see Csinparallel.org).
Board game strategy development in CS2. Instructors provide the engine, which provides the graphics and true game state. Students write a player that maintains its representation of the state and decides on a move. In my CS3? we had a similar project with reversei / othello as the game. Then for research, half of the students were assigned to develop components in the game engine and other students developed the players. Students developing players had higher enjoyment and felt they learned more, although there was little difference in grades.
I also visited several posters that were interesting. In one, they studied why students dropped out of CS1 courses. Only two measures were statistically significant: first, how much computer science experience a student had before taking the class, and second, how busy (total work, not just credits) the student was that semester. Switching to active-learning had no real effect. Gender made no difference. Intention of majoring in computer science was not a factor.
The other poster looked at measuring the style of the code in CS1 assignments automatically. They found that their tool was able to cluster the student submissions based on stylistic similarity and that grades for each cluster had a 90% confidence. I'm intrigued! Style is important and being able to emphasize style further is great.
And then I talked with other attendees for many hours, which is one of the reasons that I'm there.
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