Exploiting on-line data sources as the basis of programming projects

DePasquale, Peter

doi:10.1145/1121341.1121430

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…At the CS 2 level, students may not yet be ready to work with live clients but they are able to work with live data. At RU, the CS 2 class includes an introduction to JSON formatted data (as described by Depasquale [2]), web services, and the concept of a web crawler. These live, online data sources provide a rich area for CS 2 level projects and in-class discussions.…”

Section: Live Data In Csmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Integrating Live Projects Into Computing Curriculum

Chase

Uppuluri

Lewis

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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SUMMARYIt is well understood and has been well documented that there is much to gain by using live projects in the computer science classroom [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Live projects include those that serve a real client with a real problem as well as those those that integrate live datasets. However, the use of live projects has always come with a variety of challenges including supporting the project once it is complete, providing secure and safe access to large data sets, adjusting live client expectations, and limiting the scope of a project to the context of a single term and within the learning outcomes. The purpose of this special session is to provide attendees an introduction to and examples of the way that live projects have been integrated throughout the computing curriculum at Radford University. OVERALL OBJECTIVEUsing live projects in a computer science course provides a variety of benefits for the students including: • Experience with realistic situations, strict deadlines, teamwork, written and oral communications skills [11, 12] • Easing the transition from school to work [9] • Experience with unstable client requirements [7] • The challenge of working with a large, complex project with uncertain requirements [5] • Experience with pair and/or team programming working with real clients and real timelines [8] • Increased motivation from knowing their work will actually be used [4] to having fun with live projects [13] • Experience with having work critiqued by actual clients [10] • An integration experience applying concepts learned to live projects [6]This session will explain how and why live projects have been integrated into the computing curriculum at Radford University, and to help the audience understand how it is possible to overcome the challenges associated with live projects. These challenges include:• Increased time, organizational and pedagogical demands on the instructor [1] -includes issues such as pre-semester analysis and design and post-project maintenance• Constraining the scope of a project to meet the academic calendar [6] • Access to appropriate, secure data sets free of identifying personal information • Solicitation of clients for one or two term projects • Management of consistency and synergy when large projects are broken down into one semester chunks

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Section: Live Data In Csmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…">SUMMARYIt is well understood and has been well documented that there is much to gain by using live projects in the computer science classroom [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Live projects include those that serve a real client with a real problem as well as those those that integrate live datasets.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating Live Projects Into Computing Curriculum

Chase

Uppuluri

Lewis

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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“…Stevenson's real-world programming assignments [10,11] are a web crawler, spam evaluator, and steganography. DePasquale [2] presents three data sources: stock quotes, and the APIs from Google and Slashdot.…”

Section: Comparison To Other Teaching Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introductory programming meets the real world

Anderson

Ernst

Ordóñez

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 45th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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Too many students in introductory programming classes fail to understand the significance and utility of the concepts being taught. Their low motivation impacts their learning. One contributing factor is pedagogy that emphasizes computing for its own sake and assignments that are abstract, such as computing the factorial function.Many educators have improved on such traditional approaches by teaching concepts in contexts that students find more relevant, such as games, robots, and media. Now, it is time to take the next step.In this special session, participants will develop and discuss ways to teach introductory programming by means of real-world data analysis problems from science, engineering, business, and the humanities. Students can be motivated to learn programming in order to analyze DNA, predict the outcome of elections, detect fraudulent data, suggest friends in a social network, determine the authorship of texts, and more (see Section 3.4 for more examples). The approach is more than just a collection of "nifty assignments": rather, it affects the choice of topics and pedagogy, all of which together lead to greater student satisfaction.The approach has been successfully used at 4 colleges and universities. The classes were effective for both CS and non-CS majors. Neither the computing material nor the problems need to be "dumbed down". At the end of the term students were amazed and delighted at the real data analysis that they could perform. They were excited about applying computation in their work and about learning more.The special session contains a mix of activities, including comparative analysis of introductory classes; group discussion of curriculum design; a mini-panel discussing how the approach has worked in practice; and brainstorming about example assignments and curriculum revision.

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“…The primer for examples in exploiting online data sources comes from Peter DePasquale's paper on using online data sources in coursework [1]. In it, he proposes ideas including looking at stock data, search engine APIs, and other sources of data.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Online data sources are an interesting approach to making assignments come alive for students [1,2]. These data sources can include items such as historic data, census data, stock data, DNA sequences, and others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A data type to exploit online data sources

Thornton

Edwards

2008

SIGCSE Bull.

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Recent work in developing student assignments has involved making use of online data resources to make them more interesting and to give students real world information to interact with in some manner. While definitely a practical approach, the work that has been done so far is either for "CS0" courses targeted at non-majors, often using tools like Microsoft Excel, or courses that require a level of skill at programming from the students. Additionally, existing tools are specific to a particular structure of the data (CSV, XML, and others). As a result, these constraints make on-line real-world data sets difficult to use in typical introductory programming courses for majors.Objects-first approaches to teaching introductory programming advocate the use of objects early on. Consequently, students are able to take advantage of using data types early on. We have created an interface that allows students to access real-world data sets from online (or local) sources in a uniform fashion. This abstraction allows students with minimal programming experience to load, process, and manipulate external data sets in a variety of formats. We also developed a lab assignment where students accessed an online CSV data source to demonstrate feasibility and to gain experience with classroom use of this approach.

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Exploiting on-line data sources as the basis of programming projects

Cited by 9 publications

References 2 publications

Integrating Live Projects Into Computing Curriculum

Integrating Live Projects Into Computing Curriculum

Introductory programming meets the real world

A data type to exploit online data sources

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