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Engagement and Sustainability in a Data Structures Course in C for Non-Specialists

Published: 06 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper is an experience report that deals with engagement and sustainability in a data structures course in C for non-specialists. The course is offered annually to about 200 engineering students who are not in the computer engineering option. We describe and justify a variety of engaging and sustainable practices, and provide benefits and caveats from the lessons we learned. These may be useful to instructors who are interested in either creating such a course or using some of its practices, while trying to achieve both high engagement and high sustainability when teaching non-specialists.

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Fuller, U., Johnson, C., Ahoniemi, T., Cukierman, D., Hernan-Losada, I., Jackova, J., Lahtinen, E., Lewis, T., Thompson, D., Riedesel, C., and Thompson, E. 2007. "Developing a Computer Science-specific Learning Taxonomy", SIGCSE Bulletin, 39(4), 152--170.
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Hanks, B., Fitzgerald S., McCauley, R., Murphy, L., and Zander, C. 2011. "Pair Programming in Education: A Literature Review", Computer Science Education, 21(2), 135--173.
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Parlante, N. 1996--2003. "Essential C" (http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/101), "Pointers and Memory" (http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/102), and "Linked List Basics" (http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/103), referenced January 28, 2016.
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Cited By

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  • (2017)In-Lab Programming Tests in a Data Structures Course in C for Non-SpecialistsProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3017680.3017766(339-344)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2017
  • (2017)Information practices for sustainabilityJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2382568:9(2128-2138)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WCCCE '16: Proceedings of the 21st Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education
May 2016
137 pages
ISBN:9781450343558
DOI:10.1145/2910925
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 06 May 2016

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Author Tags

  1. C programming
  2. Data structures
  3. algorithms
  4. course transformation
  5. engagement
  6. learning
  7. sustainability
  8. teaching

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WCCCE '16

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WCCCE '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 35 submissions, 74%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 78 of 117 submissions, 67%

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View all
  • (2017)In-Lab Programming Tests in a Data Structures Course in C for Non-SpecialistsProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3017680.3017766(339-344)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2017
  • (2017)Information practices for sustainabilityJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2382568:9(2128-2138)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017

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