About Me
My name is Arunima Suri, and I am a rising sophomore at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I plan on graduating in May of 2027 with a dual degree in Computer Science and Education. My main research interests revolve around Education Technology and Computer Science Education. This interest stems from spending many years taking computer science classes and also working as a tutor for younger students. In high school, I created and led an introductory python course at my local library, and in college, I work through the Society of Women Engineers organize STEM workshops for girl scouts.
I can be reached at arunima@suri.org or found on LinkedIn.
About My Mentor
Dr. Susan H. Rodger is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science and a Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University. Her research area of focus is Computer Science Education, in which she has created visual and interactive software for Computer Science and worked on integrating computing into K-12 education. One of her most popular tools is JFLAP, a software for experimenting with formal languages and automata, and it is being used in over 160 countries with over 700,000 new users between 2012 and 2022. Dr. Rodger also has many external relationships surrounding this field, including the Computing Research Association, Coursera, IBM, and ACM SIGCSE. A more comprehensive list of her current work can be found here.
About My Project
My research project this summer focuses on creating autograders for open-ended assignments for an introductory python course on Coursera. Part of this work includes doing an extensive literature review on autograders and open-ended assignments to understand what types of systems already exist – open-ended assignments in general are known to be a new concept in Computer Science education and autograding these open-ended assignments is essentially unheard of. In terms of the autograders themselves, they will be written in python, using the testing framework, pytest, for supplementary functionality. Concurrent with this work, I am also taking an introductory research course, UR2PhD, to help strengthen my understanding of the research process.