This page collects and summarizes our work on the design, implementation and assessment of a new introductory computer science course at Dickinson College. Work on this project has been funded in part by award DUE-0511264 through the NSF CCLI-A&I program.

The objective of this project is the design, implementation and assessment of a new introductory computer science course at Dickinson College. Current and past versions of this course have struggled with two significant challenges. First, it has been difficult to balance the tradeoff between the development of individual programming ability and competing factors such as the benefits of collaborative learning and of providing significant design and debugging assistance for novice programmers. Second, given the limited size and complexity of introductory programming assignments, it has been difficult to motivate the use of a well-defined development methodology. This project focuses on addressing these difficulties in our introductory computer science course through the adaptation and implementation of three exemplary practices: test-driven development, pair programming and laboratory practica.

Each of these exemplary practices plays a complementary role in addressing the difficulties that we have experienced with our introductory course. The use of Test-Driven-Development (TDD) motivates students to adopt a systematic approach to developing and testing their programs by advocating the incremental creation and testing of software. Pair programming provides design and debugging assistance while leveraging the benefits of collaborative learning by having two students use a well-defined collaboration protocol to complete programming assignments. Laboratory practica increase students' motivation to develop their individual programming skills by requiring them to demonstrate these skills under controlled exam-like conditions. Also, because these practica provide an accurate gauge of individual programming ability, their use presents a valuable assessment tool.

The goals that were established for this project were: (1) Adapt and integrate pair programming, TDD and the use of lab practica in the creation of a new introductory computer science course at Dickinson College. (2) Assess (a) the success and retention rate of students, particularly women and minorities, in the introductory and subsequent courses, (b) the development of students' individual programming skills, (c) students' use and mastery of the TDD methodology and (d) the effects of pair programming on (a), (b) and (c). (3) Refine and disseminate the materials developed for our course in order to facilitate further adaptation and implementation of these exemplary practices.

Braught, G., Eby, L. & Wahls, T. (2009) The Case for Pair Programming in the Computer Science Classroom. Submitted to Transactions on Computing Education (ToCE). Under review, submitted 7/16/2009.

MacCormick, J., Braught, G. & Wahls, T. (2010) The benefits of pairing by ability for pair programming assignments. To appear in SIGCSE 2010.

Braught, G., Eby, L. & Wahls, T. (2008). The Effects of Pair-Programming on Individual Programming Skills. In Proceedings of the thirty ninth ACM-SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. (pp. 200-204). (Also appears in: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 40(1), 200-204.)

Braught, G. & Wahls, T. (2008). Teaching Objects in Context. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 23(5), 101-109.

Braught, G., Wahls, T. and Ziantz, L. (2007). Assessing The Effects of Pair-Programming on Individual Ability: Results from the First Year of a Two-Year Study. Faculty Poster Session, The thirty eighth ACM-SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Covington KY, March 7-10, 2007.

G. Braught, T. Wahls & Ziantz, L. Integration and Assessment of Pair Programming, Unit Testing and Lab Practica in an Introductory Computer Science Course. NSF CCLI Showcase at SIGCSE07, Covington, KY, March 7-10, 2007.

All of the materials from our course may be freely adopted and/or adapted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Course syllabus, class schedule and assignments

This page shows the course web page including all of the course policies, reading assignments, homework assignments and lab assignments as offered at Dickinson in the Spring 2008 semester.

Lecture Notes for each Class Period

This file contains a combination of MS Word and PowerPoint documents that were used as the lecture notes during the Spring 2008 semester.

Lab Assignments

The lab assignments for our course are based on the idea of having students implement and test classes that define objects that are used in the context of a larger application. All of the scaffolding code (GUI ect...) for the larger application is provided for the students along with a specification for the classes that they must implement and test. The classes implemented by the students are carefully designed to emphasize particular programming skills and concepts that correspond with the first half of the BlueJ Text.

Instructor Materials

The materials listed below will be made available to instructors in electronic format upon request. To request the materials send an e-mail from your institutional e-mail address to braught@dickinson.edu. Please include in your e-mail a link to your institutional or departmental home page so that your status as an instructor can be verified.

• Homework Solutions: Written solutions to all of the homework exercises.
• Lab Assignment Solutions and Test Cases: BlueJ projects containing solutions to all of the lab assignments. The solutions also contain a set of JUnit instructor reference tests.
• Sample Exams: Exams given during the first 4 semesters that this course was offered. This includes in-class (50 minute) mid-term exams and cumulative final exams.
• Sample Lab Practica: The lab practica given during the first 4 semesters that this course was offered. This includes BlueJ projects that were distributed to the students as well as the instructor solutions including JUnit reference tests.

The pre/post semester student attitude surveys that were used in our study may be freely adopted and/or adapted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Student Surveys

Student surveys were administered at the start and end of each semester. These surveys collected data regarding student predisposition toward the course and reaction to the course. The student responses to these surveys from the two years of our study are contained in the "Course and Student Data" below.

All of the data collected during our study has been anonymized and is provided here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Course and Student Data

An Excel file containing course and student data. This file includes student grades for homework, lab assignments, mid-term exams, lab practica and final exams for the two years of our study. In addition, the file contains demographic data, SAT scores and student responses to the pre/post survey questions.

Web-CAT Data

An Excel file containing data on every Web-CAT submission made by every student across the two years of our study. The data includes submission times, scores for style, correctness and testing, and code metrics such as lines of code.

We would like to thank Marlin Eby, from Messiah College, for his discussions that were helpful in designing our study and for his invaluable expertise in analyzing the results.

We would also like to thank Stephen Edwards, from Virginia Tech, for supporting our integration of Test-Driven-Development by hosting our courses on his Web-CAT server.

Finally, we would like to thank all of the students who were gracious enough to participate in this study.