Media Computation Collages in AP CS

Nice to see AP CS teachers picking up Media Computation, and hope to see more of that when Barbara’s Picture Lab starts rolling out.  Myra Deister also sent me links to her AP CS students’ use of MediaComp.

We worked through several activities, focusing on filters and transformations. The students enjoyed seeing that they could write programs that performed some of the same features as Photoshop. The unit concluded with a collage project in which students combined several of their filters and transformations into a final and unique image.

I was extremely pleased to see that one of the new AP Computer Science labs, Picture Lab, was developed by Barbara Ericson and is based on her book. I think this new lab will bring an authentic and engaging series of activities to a wider audience.

via Media Computation Collages | Pedagogue Padawan.

Success in Introductory Programming: What Works?

Leo Porter, Charlie McDowell, Beth Simon, and I collaborated on a paper on how to make introductory programming work, now available in CACM. It’s a shorter, more accessible version of Leo and Beth’s best-paper-award winning SIGCSE 2013 paper, with history and kibitzing from Charlie and me :

Many Communications readers have been in faculty meetings where we have reviewed and bemoaned statistics about how bad attrition is in our introductory programming courses for computer science majors (CS1). Failure rates of 30%–50% are not uncommon worldwide. There are usually as many suggestions for how to improve the course as there are faculty in the meeting. But do we know anything that really works?

We do, and we have research evidence to back it up. Pair programming, peer instruction, and media computation are three approaches to reforming CS1 that have shown positive, measurable impacts. Each of them is successful separately at improving retention or helping students learn, and combined, they have a dramatic effect.

via Success in Introductory Programming: What Works? | August 2013 | Communications of the ACM.