Leveraging Community Software in CS Education to Avoid Reinventing the Wheel

Abstract

Historically, computing instructors and researchers have developed a wide variety of tools to support teaching and educational research, including exam and code testing suites and data collection solutions. Many are then community or individually maintained. However, these tools often find limited adoption beyond their creators. As a result, it is common for many of the same functionalities to be re-implemented by different instructional groups within the CS Education community. We hypothesize that this is due in part to accessibility, discoverability, and adaptability challenges, among others. Further, instructors often face institutional barriers to deployment, which can include hesitance of institutions to utilize community developed solutions that often lack a centralized authority.This working group will explore what solutions are currently available, what instructors need, and reasons behind the abovementioned phenomenon. This will be accomplished via a literature review and survey to identify the tools that have been developed by the community; the solutions that are currently available and in use by instructors; what features are needed moving forward for classroom and research use; what support for extensions is * Working group leader

Towards Giving Timely Formative Feedback and Hints to Novice Programmers

“…These problems have been raised by other researchers, and we found this was still the case. For example, another 2022 working group studies problems related to the accessibility, discoverability, and dissemination of various tools [9].…”