Collaborative Research: Retaining and Engaging Computer Science majors By Solving and Visualizing Algorithmic Problems on Real-world Data Sets

The first two years of undergraduate Computer Science education are the most critical for building students? foundational knowledge and sustaining their interest in computer science. Both knowledge and interest help students not only develop good skills in computer science, but also increase their resolve to stay in the computer science major. This project will try to increase student knowledge and interest by adding new functionality to a software program called BRIDGES. BRIDGES helps instructors create engaging assignments for sophomore-level courses on data structures and algorithms. To help them learn about data structures, BRIDGES enables students to easily populate their own data structures with large, dynamic data sets from real-world information systems, such as popular social networks and scientific sources. Bridges also allows students to interact with visualizations of their own data structures. Preliminary results have shown that, in comparison to their peers whose data structures courses did not use BRIDGES, students in BRIDGES-enabled courses have greater knowledge gains and better progression through the major. This project will enhance BRIDGES by adding code analysis functions and new data sources that are relevant to student interests. These enhancements aim to support deeper coverage of data structures topics, which may further increase student engagement and learning. To study the impact of BRIDGES more thoroughly, BRIDGES will be adopted and studied at three other institutions. This expansion will enable evaluation of the impact of BRIDGES on different student populations. This project serves the national interest through its focus on increasing retention of students and building a more diverse STEM workforce.

The goal of this project is to extend the BRIDGES curriculum to provide engaging, relevant assignments and strengthen basic programming skills such as array addressing to reduce the number of withdrawals in the first weeks of data structure courses. A second goal is to follow best practices for engaging underrepresented students in computing. Computational complexity will be incorporated through system support in BRIDGES for performance reporting and real world algorithmic problems at different scales to afford experience with orders of growth. The project will also extend beyond the data structures course and into typical CS1/CS2 courses. BRIDGES will be adopted at three partnering institutions, including non-PhD granting institution and a liberal arts college, and will directly reach over 1000 students each year. That diversity will support studying the impact of BRIDGES on student engagement and learning across populations of students. In addition, students from the STARS Computing Corps, a national alliance for broadening participation in computing, will incorporate BRIDGES materials within their outreach programs that introduce computing concepts to K-12 students to reach an even more diverse population of students.