Week 2 Post (5/27 - 6/02)

In the second week of my DREU Research Program, Monday was a holiday due to Memorial Day. I spent the first few days of the week fixing bugs in the autograder assigned to us during week one. My team and I faced challenges figuring out how to debug the autograders since Coursera’s interface does not allow us to print statements directly to the console for debugging purposes. Once we were able to figure it out, each of us moved on to developing autograders individually.

I spent the rest of the week attending meetings and completing assignments for the UR2PhD research course. This week, we focused on drafting a research proposal for our team. As it was my first time writing a research proposal, I felt nervous but I am confident that I will improve through feedback. Additionally, I dedicated time to working on my individual autograder, gaining a deeper understanding of the lab it was meant for and anticipating the types of buggy solutions students might submit while writing the code.

Finally, I read 2 research papers this week that focused on the kind of assignments and textbook assignments that students prefer:

• “Student preferences between open-ended and structured game assignments in CS1” by Daniel C. Cliburn, Susan M. Miller, Emma Bowring. Discusses which type of game assignment students prefer in introductory programming courses. The findings revealed that over 90% of students preferred structured game assignments over open-ended ones, even though open-ended assignments could require less code. The structured assignments were favored because they provided clear guidelines and expectations, making them more manageable for students​

• “Disparity Between Textbook Examples and What Young Students Find Interesting” by Bowen Hui, Parsa Rajabi, Angie Pinchbeck. Highlights a significant gap between CS1 textbook examples and the topics that interest young students. It found that nearly half of the textbook topics do not overlap with student interests, suggesting the need for more engaging and relevant teaching materials to maintain student motivation in computer science courses.