This in-class activity enables students to explore how the quality of a hash function affects the performance of a hash table. Students write their own hashCode() function for Java strings and submit it to an autograder that determines the number of collisions that would occur with a given corpus. The results are displayed on a leaderboard for students to see in real time how their implementation compares to other students’ and the Java libraries. Afterwards, students are eager to see the winning implementations and the Java library implementations. This activity has been used successfully with 480 students in 10 sections over 3 years on Gradescope.

ACM Digital Library Entry

Role-play activities have been used for many years to help students engage with abstract content and build understanding in a fun and collaborative way. They are particularly popular in teaching object-oriented programming and concurrency, as it is relatively straightforward for students to take on the role of objects within a software system.

Software testing is typically seen as a dry and uninteresting discipline. There are several reasons for this: it involves many abstract concepts, the process of designing and writing software tests can be quite repetitive, and students struggle to see the value of thorough testing without real-world experience. These challenges create an environment where teaching software testing is particularly challenging compared to other areas of computing. To address this, we designed role-play games with the goal of improving student learning and engagement in a software testing class.

Traffic Jam is an assignment designed for a CS3-style course that is meant to (re-)introduce students to larger programming projects. Students implement a grid-based puzzle game based on the sliding block puzzle game Rush Hour. In the game, a player must slide adjacent cars facing horizontally or vertically in order to dislodge a particular car and move it to the other side of the grid.

This assignment consists of scaffolded instructions, UML diagrams, and starter files that guide students through the process of creating the game in four parts. This allows students to build on their work and to work on increasingly complex goals, from a text-based version to a graphical user interface in Java using the ACM Java library.

For this assignment, students should be familiar with arrays, methods, references, and classes. The project aims to help students gain more experience and proficiency with classes and object-oriented design in Java, as well as with event handlers and interactivity. Students learn how to read existing code and supplement it with new features to build a prototype of the game.

In this follow-up to "Embedded Ethics: Pandemic Contact Tracing and Ethical Trade-Offs" [6], students revisit a trade- off they faced in that first module. There, students brainstormed about the rich data one might collect to build a powerful app for contact tracing, discovered that this may facilitate violations of privacy, considered the harms that can come from this, and recognized the trade-off between protecting privacy and gathering data to support the fight against the spread of a disease such as COVID-19.

This Interaction Metrics OER consists of two group projects focused on teaching students how to create validated metrics for measuring human-computer interactions. If we want to measure how good a team is at teamwork, we might count communication utterances by members and see if they’re equally distributed. But is that measure predictive of team success? Probably not. If we want to measure how much a person likes an app, we might count number of uses per day or number of taps per usage session. While these metrics are countable, there’re not accurate predictors of fondness for an app. These two projects ask students to create objective, useful metrics for real-world human-technology interactions and to validate them with predictive models and collected data. I tell students these projects are about “developing metrics for things that are hard to measure” and ask them to consider whether the proliferation of inexpensive sensors, AI, and IoT might make fuzzy constructs like “team trust” or being a “good leader” more measurable.

The Micro:Vote project is designed as an introduction to text- based programming through a 12-week project aimed at 11 to 13 year olds. The project is designed as a School-University partnership whose aim is to highlight the role of creativity and social impact in computing through the design of digital voting posters using the BBC micro:bit and MicroPython.

Adopting a Design Studio approach, the project scaffolds students in the creation of a physical computing voting system and informative poster, to gather responses on an issue of social importance within the community. Through the lens of Human- Computer Interaction, students investigate the role of computing in activism and learn to implement data and control structures.

ACM Digial Library Entry

In this assignment students work as a team to build, using only specified materials, a structure through which a marble will travel,  Students first work independently developing their own segment of the structure and then work collaboratively to construct a final structure. Students are required to video tape the execution of a marble traveling through the structure lasting at least n seconds. This exercise will allow students to practice problem decomposition, abstraction, generalization, and evaluation, and also debugging and testing.

This exercise was developed as part of the NSF-funded Computational Creativity project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

This a set of "icebreaker" activities are used on the first day of an introductory programming class to help create a welcoming learning environment for students and to lay the groundwork for discussions about how to be successful in Introductory Computing. I have included student-facing slides, a sign-in handout, and a short paper with tips for implementing these activities.

In this tutorial, students create a program in Java that utilizes wrapper classes. The program must include three ArrayLists (one of type Integer, type Double, and type Character) and it needs to parse values from the ArrayList.

In this tutorial, students create a program in Java that covers methods, conditionals, and object-oriented programming. The activity requires students to use the Problem.java file to practice creating an interactive program that accepts user input and then performs some action on that entry. Then, the students must modify methods (such as answerCorrect) to evaluate the user's overall performance for answering questions correcting on the quiz/interactive program.