Paper Info
Title
BRIDGES: A System to Enable Creation of Engaging Data Structures Assignments with Real-World Data and Visualizations.
Abstract
Although undergraduate enrollment in Computer Science has remained strong and seen substantial increases in the past decade, retention of majors remains a significant concern, particularly for students at the freshman and sophomore level that are tackling foundational courses on algorithms and data structures. In this work, we present BRIDGES, a software infrastructure designed to enable the creation of more engaging assignments in introductory data structures courses by providing students with a simplified API that allows them to populate their own data structure implementations with live, real-world, and interesting data sets, such as those from popular social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook). BRIDGES also provides the ability for students to create and explore {\\em visualizations} of the execution of the data structures that they construct in their course assignments, which can promote better understanding of the data structure and its underlying algorithms; these visualizations can be easily shared via a weblink with peers, family, and instructional staff. In this paper, we present the BRIDGES system, its design, architecture and its use in our data structures course over two semesters.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2839509.2844635
SIGCSE
Field
DocType
Citations 
Data structure,Architecture,Data set,World Wide Web,Social network,Computer science,Visualization,Implementation,Software,Multimedia
Conference
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.52
2
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David Burlinson1114.41
Mihai Mehedint270.97
Chris Grafer340.52
Kalpathi R. Subramanian425021.55
Jamie Payton516625.37
Paula Goolkasian61189.73
Michael Youngblood760.90
Robert Kosara8102567.46