A Sprint-Based Approach to Teaching Computer Science

Abstract

Traditional approaches to teaching computer science often involve complex schedules of assignments, projects, and exams. Educators can struggle to balance this schedule while teaching students a course's required hard skills, using innovative pedagogy approaches, preparing students with interpersonal soft-skills, and still disincentivizing cheating. In an effort address these issues, this experience report details the author's work in developing a sprint-based teaching method. This method combines traditional lectures, selfdirected learning, and learners as designers in a way that can simplify the scheduled demands on each student, allow the application of newer pedagogical practices, and better prepare students with both hard and soft skills. Described in this paper through four iterations of refinement, this approach allows students to choose their own projects, reduces cheating opportunities, increases instructorstudent interaction time, and transitioned well to remote learning when required by the COVID-19 shutdown. Statistically significant survey results from four class sections across two semesters suggest that students prefer this approach to a traditional lecture-based teaching style. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Education; Collaborative learning; • Software and its engineering → Agile software development.

A Systematic Review of the Benefits and Challenges of Mobile Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…In contrast to in-person assessments, which make it harder to identify cheating, online exams enable instructors to detect plagiarism via the use of applications such as Turnitin, Unicheck, and PlagScan. These practices assist learners in retaining their uniqueness and developing their intellect, innovation, and dynamism, while also benefitting the institution's budget due to the absence of paperwork in the assessment [43]. Figure 3 outlines all of the benefits of M-learning.…”

The Other Side of Black Screen: Rethinking Interaction in Synchronous Remote Learning for Collaborative Programming

“…[3] investigated remote learning experiences for hardware practicals and suggested a combination of pre-recorded experiments and synchronous interactive sessions for achieving original learning outcomes. Ricks et al [42] introduced self-directed experiential learning for computer programming courses, which assumes students possess prior experience of programming. To help instructors design effective remote laboratory learning, instructors explored challenges experienced in transitioning to remote learning through surveys and interviews for introductory physics and engineering labs [17,45] and introductory physics and astronomy courses [15].…”

“…these aspects for remote education during the pandemic [13,18,42], we know little about the obstacles students in introductory lab courses with no prior programming experience face in remote learning.…”