Learning is enhanced when course materials are relevant to students’ interests and goals, and nothing works better than letting students choose what they want to pursue. When possible, allow students to choose from among a set of problems or assignments, or to choose the topic area to be addressed in a particular assignment.

Some suggestions

Make it their own. The technical requirements stay the same but let students choose the inputs (sound or graphic files, data sources) and/or the form the output takes. The EngageCSEdu collection has lots of great examples!

Be creative with extra credit. The quickest way to add student choice is to incorporate into an existing assignment an extra credit option that challenges students to explore their own application of a concept.

Let students select from a finite list of options. Students do best with bounded, rather than completely open, choices. So within a project or assignment, let students choose a topic or element from a list of possibilities. Ideally, devise the list from actual student input and not from stereotypes or conjecture on what students like.

Examples from the collection

Dynamic Word Clouds

Scott R. Portnoff, Downtown Magnets High School, Los Angeles USD

This project, the 4th unit in a year-long high school introductory programming course, teaches students how to write programs that draw text objects in an individually designed word cloud. It uses the programming language, Processing (www.processing.org), which is a simplified form of Java.

In the 1st section of the project, students learn these new text methods, and are introduced to the for-each loop. They learn how to isolate transformation operations [ translate() / rotate() ] - that are used to render each word - from having side-effects on subsequently drawn words by book-ending drawing commands between pushMatrix() and popMatrix() calls. In the 2nd section, students derive and implement the mathematics involved in animating the word cloud.

The Word Cloud program intertwines these new concepts with the major programming concepts revisited from the first 3 units: variables, conditional statements, Boolean expressions, arrays, classes, iteration and movement.

Summary of the objectives of this assignment:

Engagement Excellence

Introductory EarSketch Assignment

Greg Hendler, Lea Ikkache, Brandon Westergaard, Anna Xambó, Doug Edwards, Brian Magerko, and Jason Freeman, Georgia Institute of Technology

In this tutorial, students will learn how to navigate the EarSketch environment, and begin to use Python commands through the exploration of a song. Students are then invited to create their own song(s). After this tutorial, students will be able to use EarSketch's full curriculum and acquire deeper knowledge about Python and music composition and remixing.

This exercise is appropriate for high school-level AP CS Principles courses and well as CS0 courses at the collegiate level. This exercise is derived from a tutorial developed for the Hour of Code. It can be completed by following the instructions in the attached documents and working in the EarSketch environment (earsketch.gatech.edu).

EarSketch is a free and online learning environment. No prior knowledge in music or Python are necessary to teach this exercise. With EarSketch, students code in Python to place samples from a vast sound library into musical tracks, arrange them, and add effects.

Engagement Excellence

Simple graphics

Phill Conrad, University of California, Santa Barbara

In this project students work in pairs to create a drawing. Using a provided graphics library, students must create a drawing whose location, size, and other parameters can be changed with different calls to a function. Students are allowed to choose what to draw, and there is a competition for the best drawings. In addition to teaching graphics, the project also requires students to work collaboratively on abstracting and decomposing their code.

Engagement Excellence
See more examples

Resources

Mastermind!

Christine Alvarado, Geoff Kuenning, Ran Libeskind-Hadas, and Zachary Dodds, Harvey Mudd College

In this assignment students work either individually or in pairs to implement the game Mastermind. Mastermind is a game in which the player has to guess a sequence of randomly chosen colors based on feedback about their previous guess. Students must program the game from the ground up, creating their own decomposition design, as well as error checking user input. This assignment requires students to think carefully about design, documentation, and debugging. It is particularly useful for students who need practice writing larger programs.

The authors of this material were awarded a 2015 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this assignment. Learn more on NCWIT's awards page.

Engagement Excellence

Alien Robots!

Christine Alvarado, Geoff Kuenning, Ran Libeskind-Hadas, and Zachary Dodds, Harvey Mudd College

In this lab students work either individually or in pairs to create a game of their choosing using the VPython library. To start, students are given a basic program that shows a simple alien with limited control from the user. Students are required to make incremental changes to this program, adding more complex graphics and controls to make a more interesting game. This lab reviews classes and graphics, as well as requiring students to think about the control flow for their game. It is particularly useful for students who are new to classes and need additional practice designing classes, as well as writing methods and debugging code.

The authors of this material were awarded a 2015 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this assignment. Learn more on NCWIT's awards page.

Engagement Excellence

Creating the Mandelbrot Set

Christine Alvarado, Geoff Kuenning, Ran Libeskind-Hadas, and Zachary Dodds, Harvey Mudd College

In this lab students work either in pairs or individually to write a program that displays the Mandelbrot set. Students incrementally write functions that help them deal with nested loops, complex numbers, and graphics until they have a program that can display and zoom in/out of the Mandelbrot set. There are optional parts to the assignment that deal with visualizing escape velocities and "Mandelbrotifying" an image. In addition to reviewing nested loops and graphics, this lab requires students to use constants and use incremental design. It is particularly useful for students who need additional practice with nested loops.

Simple graphics

Phill Conrad, University of California, Santa Barbara

In this project students work in pairs to create a drawing. Using a provided graphics library, students must create a drawing whose location, size, and other parameters can be changed with different calls to a function. Students are allowed to choose what to draw, and there is a competition for the best drawings. In addition to teaching graphics, the project also requires students to work collaboratively on abstracting and decomposing their code.

Engagement Excellence
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