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With recent research discussing the benefits of student's practicing programming skills in many small focused assignments and longstanding support for providing automated tests to students (including tools such as Web-Cat that have been around for a decade), the logical next step is to provide a suite of small practice problems with automated tests. However, this approach does not address the problem of motivation or the quality of the experience for students. From experience, the typical prod (mandatory graded items) has limited success, and adds the burden of including these items within the assessment framework for a course that may dilute the assessment power of the final course grade. We propose to gamify the practice process. Similar to modern games we will provide a clear progression path with continuous rewards for completing tasks. Additionally, the tasks will be small in scope with support for providing custom automated tests to support automated verification of student work and automated feedback. The goal is to develop a customizable programming practice problem system for use in an introductory course for supplementary practice.

Exams are an integral assessment component in CS1 courses. However, little research exists concerning the impact of the exam format on student performance. To address this deficit, we conducted a year-long study to investigate student performance across two test formats, paper and IDE, with the goal of identifying any differences attributable to the format. Data was collected from the second and third exams over the course of two semesters, with five sections per semester. Each exam, whether paper or IDE, was constructed from a common list of concepts to ensure comparability across formats and sections. To assess the impact of exam format, we considered three points of concern. The first factor, grade received, provides a direct indication of student performance. Next, we examined the type of error committed by students (either syntax or logic) to determine influence of exam format (e.g., Does an IDE reduce the occurrence of syntax errors?). Finally, we considered exam completion rates to address concerns such as if the additional feedback might be overwhelming students in an already stressful environment (exam-taking) leading to lower completion rates.

This paper discusses a technique for supporting omniscient debugging for model transformations, which are used to define core operations on software and system models. Similar to software systems developed using general-purpose languages, model transformations are also subject to human error and may possess defects. Existing model-driven engineering tools provide stepwise execution to aid developers in locating and removing defects. In this paper, we describe our investigation into a technique and associated algorithms that support omniscient debugging features for model transformations. Omniscient debugging enables enhanced navigation and exploration features during a debugging session beyond those possible in a strictly stepwise execution environment. Finally, the execution time performance is comparatively evaluated against stepwise execution, and the scalability (in terms of memory usage) is empirically investigated.

One of the most innovative features of the new AP Computer Science Principles course framework is that it includes the Global Impact of Computing-not just as an occasional flourish, but as one of its foundational Big Ideas (#7). The real-world impact of computing-on society and on their own lives-is a great hook that can stimulate students' lasting interest in computer science, whether in CSP or any other CS class. Teach Global Impact is a collaborative effort among leading computer science educators that leverages seven excellent CSP curricula and PD programs. (BJC, CISS, Code.org CSP, CS Matters, CSP CS4HS, Mobile CSP, and UTeach CSP.) These curricula are contributing activities that highlight the potential impacts of big data, multimedia, artificial intelligence, and Internet connectivity, among other things. We are working to bring together all of these existing Global Impact lesson materials into a unified resource, and to fill in any gaps by creating new materials, along with classroom strategy guides for teaching about impact. This lightning talk will introduce teachers to the resources available on the Teach Global Impact website, including a database of existing materials, new activities and strategy guides, and a Computing in the News feed featuring student-curated stories aligned with CSP learning objectives. We'll also talk about new activities in the works, including classroom simulations around net neutrality and encryption ethics, a lesson plan on online research and writing for CS, and a series of videos illustrating key essential knowledge points.

The College Board estimates that the new AP CS Principles (CSP) course will set a participation record for new course launches. With a large number of students across the USA enrolling in CSP at the high school level, CS departments at colleges and universities will need to begin considering their position for awarding AP credit. One possibility is the introduction of a new college-focused CSP course for non-majors that can serve as a mapping for AP credit. This paper summarizes the experiences of two faculty at different universities who were official CSP College Board Pilots for several years. An overview of each university's experience is provided in terms of student demographics, common evaluation measures, and individual course nuances, followed by a series of recommendations to faculty who are considering the creation of a CSP course within the curriculum of their own department.

This poster describes how this project has induced teacher preparation and broadened student participation in Computer Science Principles throughout Alabama from 2013-2016. We will describe our professional development (PD) model, gain for participating instructors, results of CS Principles course implementations, and student engagement and outcomes. A statewide and scalable "Teacher Leader" model of professional development was implemented throughout the project. In person training was coupled with on-line course content, geographically proximal teacher groups, and periodic teacher hangouts. Teachers in each cohort collaborated together on developing course content and pedagogy, fostered by peer leaders from earlier cohorts. Instructors encouraged and engaged their students; student agreed that the learning environments supported diversity. Students gained significantly in core computer science content (i.e., abstraction and algorithms) as well as computational thinking practices. Female students showed robust gains on a number of indicators (including higher course grades than males); under-represented minority students showed positive gains in content knowledge. The majority of students said they were likely or possibly likely to pursue computer science in college, and that taking CS Principles impacted their decisions.

CS Principles is a new AP course being developed by the College Board and introduced into high schools across the nation. To aid and encourage the adoption of the new CSP course, we have developed a Massively-Open Online Course (MOOC) over the past two years that serves as a professional development (PD) offering for CS Principles. Additionally, we have provided a parallel face-to-face workshop for a smaller group of MOOC participants. In this paper, we discuss our experiences conducting PD using a MOOC. We investigated the impact of the face-to-face event and online community on participants' completion and performance in the course. Our analysis suggests that participants who have even just a few days of face-to-face engagement tend to be more successful in completing a multi-week MOOC.

In model-driven engineering, stakeholders work on models in order to design, transform, simulate, and analyze systems. Complex systems typically involve many stakeholder groups working in a coordinated manner on different aspects of a system. Therefore, there is a need for collaborative platforms to allow modelers to work together. Previously, we introduced the cloud-based multi-user tool AToMPM, designed to address the challenges for building a collaborative platform for modeling. This paper presents on the multi-user, multi-view architecture of AToMPM and an initial evaluation of its performance and scalability.

Complex systems typically involve many stakeholder groups working in a coordinated manner on different aspects of a system. In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), stakeholders work on models in order to design, transform, simulate, and analyze the system. Therefore, there is a growing need for collaborative platforms for modelers to work together. A cloud-based system allows them to concurrently work together. This chapter presents the challenges for building such environments. It also presents the architecture of a cloud-based multi-view modeling environment based on AToMPM.

International audience; Omniscient debugging is a promising technique that relies on execution traces to enable free traversal of the states reached by a system during an execution. While some General-Purpose Languages (GPLs) already have support for omniscient debugging, developing such a complex tool for any executable Domain-Specific Modeling Language (xDSML) remains a challenging and error prone task. A solution to this problem is to define a generic omniscient debugger for all xDSMLs. However, generically supporting any xDSML both compromises the efficiency and the usability of such an approach. Our contribution relies on a partly generic omniscient debugger supported by generated domain-specific trace management facilities. Being domain-specific, these facilities are tuned to the considered xDSML for better efficiency. Usability is strengthened by providing multidimensional omniscient debugging. Results show that our approach is on average 3.0 times more efficient in memory and 5.03 more efficient in time when compared to a generic solution that copies the model at each step.

Model transformations (MTs) are central artifacts in model-driven engineering (MDE) that define core operations on models. Like other software artifacts, MTs may possess defects (bugs). Some MDE tools provide support for debugging. In this paper, we describe an omniscient debugging technique. Our technique enhances stepwise execution support for MTs by providing the ability to traverse, in either direction, the execution history of a live debugging session. We also introduce a proof of concept prototype applying the described technique and a preliminary study of the scalability, in terms of memory consumption, and performance, in terms of time to execute.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study investigating the formation, use, and impact of queries during debugging tasks. The results of this study provide additional evidence regarding the impact of query-based debuggers and can inform efforts that are focused on developing and improving query-based debuggers.

Educators are often seeking new ways to motivate or inspire students to learn. Our past efforts in K-12 outreach included robotics and media computation as the contexts for teaching Computer Science (CS). With the deep interest in mobile technologies among teenagers, our recent outreach has focused on using smartphones as a new context. This paper is an experience report describing our approach and observations from teaching a summer camp for high school students using App Inventor (AI). The paper describes two separate methods (one using a visual block language, and another using Java) that were taught to high school students as a way to create Android applications. We observed that initiating the instruction with the block language, and then showing the direct mapping to an equivalent Java version, assisted students in understanding app development in Java. Our evaluation of the camp includes observations of student work and artifact assessment of student projects. Although the assessment suggests the camp was successful in several areas, we present numerous lessons learned based on our own reflection on the camp content and instruction.

This paper describes our experiences in building a virtual keyboard implemented using a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) that interacts with the eMotiv EPOC Neural Headset. The contribution of the work is an alternative input device for those who have a motor disability and are challenged by traditional input devices. The advantages of a virtual keyboard based on BCI are summarized and we describe its design and implementation. We also present the results of a preliminary study that has suggested several improvements for enhancing the effectiveness of the virtual keyboard.