In this lab, students dissect a working implementation of the Tic-Tac-Toe game using process oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL). Learning objectives include functional decomposition, using multidimensional arrays, and team management. This lab allows students to read an existing program rather than creating one from scratch.

In this project, a student (or a pair of students) builds from scratch a Java implementation of the Pig dice game. Advice is provided on breaking this task down into stages. Learning objectives include using Java data types, operators, and control structures.

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 a team-based classroom activity using Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning. Teams of 3-4 students work together to learn about unit testing in general, JUnit in particular, and effective test strategies.

The attached files are the student's versions of the activities. Please contact the author for the teacher's versions with solutions and additional information.

This is a team-based classroom activity using Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL). Teams of 3-4 students work together to learn about HTML documents and links. Part 1 of the activity focuses on markup in general, HTML markup in particular, and related issues.

The attached file is the student's version of the activity. Please contact the author for the teacher's version with solutions and additional information.

This is a team-based classroom activity using Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL). Teams of 3-4 students work together to learn about markup in general, HTML markup in particular, and related issues. Part 2 of the activity focuses on HTML documents and links.

This programming assignment requires students to consider a collection of Old English poetry and prose texts and consider the conjecture if any words appear only in the poetry (throughout the entire corpus)? And if so, how many times do these words occur? Students use a Python dictionary (also called a “hash table” or “map”) to keep track of all words in the poetry and then remove words from that dictionary that appear in the prose. Learning goals include problem decomposition (functions), extending existing code, technical writing, and writing scripts to produce HTML output.

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

This Python programming assignment requires students to seek evidence to help answer the following conjecture: True or False? Tolkien wanted his readers to fully appreciate that his elves were large, thus he used the word “tall” (or other variants such as “big”, “giant”, “large”, etc.) in close proximity to the name of an elf (e.g., “Legolas”, “Galadriel” or even the generic word, “elf”). Learning goals include problem decomposition (functions), extending existing code, technical writing, building an app to handle a wide range of input texts, and writing scripts to produce Excel-ready (comma-separated value) output.

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.