This is an ice-breaker activity you can use early in a course to help students get to know each other in a low risk, fun way.

How to Do It: Students are given templates and instructions on how to build a simple paper airplane. Before making their plane, each student writes on their paper three things about themselves that they are willing to share. It's fun to encourage them to share creative or unexpected things.

They then send their plane off into the classroom, picking up others' planes and flying them. Don't be afraid to let pandemonium reign for a while! Then, have each student pick up a plane that is not their own. The goal, then, is for everyone to find the creator of the plane by introducing themselves to successive individuals, asking only questions pertaining to what's written on the plane. Once everyone has found their plane's creator, have students form a circle. The first person introduces the creator of their plane (their name and the 3 things). Then, that person introduces the creator of their plane, and so on until everyone has been introduced. 

This lab involves students coming up with a poll on a subject in which they are interested; administering the poll to students, faculty and staff on campus; and writing a program to calculate and manipulate poll results. The example provided uses a poll based upon the 2016 US presidential election, although any poll data will do. One goal of this lab is for students to learn how to use arrays of structures. Another is for students to create a program that uses most of the concepts covered in CS1 as a culminating project. Students may work individually or in pairs.

This lab is done in a course that teaches the basics of computational problem solving by exposing students to the building blocks of programming: variables, looping, branching, functions, arrays, etc. The goals of this assignment are (1) to reinforce CS concepts from class and (2) to introduce students to basic hardware components. Using an Arduino clone kit and ultrasonic sensor, students work together to build a pumpkin that flashes LED(s) and makes noise. This project is done in fall semester and is timed to align with Halloween. 

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 lab, students dissect a working implementation of the Shut the Box dice game using process oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL). Learning objectives include declaring and creating arrays and accessing their elements, using and explaining the parts of for loops, and working effectively as a team. This lab allows students to read an existing program rather than creating one from scratch.

The author of this material was awarded a 2017 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this and two other of his POGIL assignments. Learn more about the award at https://www.ncwit.org/project/ncwit-engagecsedu-engagement-excellence-awards.

This paper introduces three assignments—each with their own “starter kits” for students—for those with a love of the written (and digital) word. These assignments are part of a ‘Computing for Poets’ course that exposes students to leading markup languages (HTML, CSS, XML) and teaches computer programming as a vehicle to explore and “data mine” digitized texts. Recent advances in computer software, hypertext, and database methodologies have made it possible to ask novel questions about a poem, a story, a trilogy, or an entire corpus. Programming facilitates top-down thinking and practice with computational thinking skills such as problem decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and experimental design, topics that humanities students in our experience rarely see. Programming on and with digitized texts introduces students to rich new areas of scholarship including stylometry (i.e., the statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another), applied to, for example, authorship attribution.

The three assignments highlighted are:

Reading Poetry Backwards 

This is the third project for computational art (CS1) using Processing where students create a self portrait using a digital image of themselves as the starting point. In this project, students learn about 2D to 1D array mapping and indexing as well as practice using loops via the plotting of a shape using a parametric equation. The objectives for this project are:

In this project, students merge their lab 2 code and add animation to explore the use of variables (and explore the process of merging two code bases together). The objectives for this project are:

1. Practice using Processing
2. Practice using simple primitives and shapes in Processing
3. Practice using methods to encapsulate parts of your code for re-use
4. Practice integrating two student’s code
5. Practice scaling and translating shapes into a single coordinate frame
6. Practice animating via transforms and variables
7. Practice developing your aesthetic
8. Make an interesting ‘story’ combining two existing designs and adding animation

This is a lab exercise in which students work in pairs to identify the hardware components on a Raspberry Pi, connect peripheral devices to it, perform the initial software installation, and log onto the computer. This lab assumes no prior experience and is the first lab of the semester.

The learning goals for the lab assignment are:

• Know the basic architecture of a computing device
• Understand the difference between hardware and software
• Be able to connect a Raspberry Pi to peripheral devices, turn it on, and access the computer's command line interface

At the conclusion of this lab students are able to:

• Identify and understand the basic architecture of a computer: processor, storage, and input/output
• List the basic steps for instruction processing in the Von Neumann Model of computer architecture

This assignment requires students to write regular expressions (regex) to match patterns in words that solve word puzzles. A number of the puzzles are taken from WIll Shortz' books (1996, 2003). Shortz is National Public Radio's (NPR) puzzle master. This assignment is a stand-alone exercise for practice with the powerful pattern-matching syntax of regular expressions. The assignment involves no programming. A web-based CGI compares student regex with a dictionary of words and returns a table of resulting word matches. A "starter kit" includes a series of word puzzles to encourage regex play.

The author of this material was awarded a 2016 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this assignment. Learn more on NCWIT's awards page.