Engaging Early Programming Students with Modern Assignments Using BRIDGES∗

Early programming courses, such as CS1, are an important time to capture the interest of the students while imparting important technical knowledge. Yet many CS1 sections use contrived assignments and activities that tend to make students uninterested and doubt the usefulness of the content. We demonstrate that one can make an interesting CS1 experience for students by coupling interesting datasets with visual representations and interactive applications. Our approach enables teaching an engaging early programming course without changing the content of that course. This approach relies on the BRIDGES system that has been under development for the past 5 years; BRIDGES provides easy access to datasets and interactive applications. The assignments we present are all scaffolded to be directly integrated into most early programming courses to make routine topics more compelling and exciting.