During this week of my program, I worked alongside my peers to finish up our first autograder and began to go through the peer and mentor code review process. In this, I was able to get a better understanding of some key programming design principles and also work to improve the way that I write code. In addition, I started working on my first solo autograder for a lab about while loops and indexing. I was able to write all the student solutions and even all the pytest test cases to grade the different student solutions. And through this, I have learned many new debugging techniques to help identify errors in my code. Side by side with this work, I also read two research papers about open-ended assignments (highlighted below) and continued to work through my research class. This week of the class focused on learning how to search for literature and working on our research proposal drafts.

Papers Read:

“Weekly Open-Ended Exercises and Student Motivation in CS1” by Sadia Sharmin, Daniel Zingaro, and Clare Brett

This paper tries to solve the problem of computer science assignments more standardized as enrollment numbers increase by conducting a study on the impact of open-ended/creative assignments on student motivation and engagement using quantitative and qualitative analysis. Results showed that open-ended exercises had a positive impact on student motivation, confidence, and satisfaction. That being said, it was also clear that providing students with too much freedom could be detrimental, and therefore, instructors need to find a good balance.

“ENCOURAGING CREATIVITY IN INTRODUCTORY COMPUTER SCIENCE PROGRAMMING ASSIGNMENTS” by Tammy VanDeGrift

This paper was on the older side (2007), so the main information I was trying to extract from it was getting a clear defintion for what an open-ened assignment is and how they have been used in the past. It proposed changing the format of typical CS1 programming assignments to include aspects of creativity (what they call open-ended assignments) in the hopes that it would increase student engagement and ownership of their work. Unfortunately, the paper did not come to a clear result for its study.