Student and Teacher CSP Ebooks are now Available

We now have TWO ebooks supporting CS Principles (see website here) now available — one for teachers and one for students.

Our teacher ebook summer study is now ended. (Announcement about launching the study is here.) We’re crunching the data now. We’ve already learned a lot about what teachers want in an ebook. We learned where our user interface wasn’t obvious, and where we needed to explain more. We learned that teachers expect end-of-chapter exercises. We have used what we have learned so far to produce the two new ebooks.

STUDENT CSP EBOOK: About a year ago, we received additional NSF funding (from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program) to develop a student version of our CSP ebook. We have been running participatory design studies and gathering usability surveys from students to get input on what a student ebook should look like. We have now released the first version of the student ebook.

The student CSP ebook is available at http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/StudentCSP/index.html  It doesn’t require a login, but we recommend that teachers have their students login. Without a login, we store saved answers on the local computer, but if the student logs in, we save the answers by the student’s username.  The course name is StudentCSP.

We recommend that teachers create a custom version of the student ebook for your students.  This allows teachers to customize the ebook, assign homework, and view student’s progress, and even create additional assessments for students.

New Version TEACHER CSP EBOOK: We iterated on our teacher ebook at the same time that we were developing the student ebook. We hypothesize that the student CSP ebook may actually encourage teachers to complete the teacher ebook. We can imagine that teachers who use the student ebook might want to stay one step ahead of the students, e.g., “My students are starting Chapter 3 on Monday, so I better finish Chapter 3 this weekend.”

We have now created a second version of our teacher CSP ebook. This one is in lockstep with the student CSP ebook, includes all the end-of-chapter exercise answers and teacher notes (e.g., on how to teach particular concepts, common student difficulties, etc.). We are not making the second teacher ebook available openly (because it includes answers to the student problems).

Teachers, please contact us at cslearn4u@gmail.com with the name and location of your school, and we’ll send you the URL.

We recommend that teachers create their own course for their students.  See http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/overview/instructor.html for why a teacher might want to build a custom course and how to do it.

• You must register on Runestone first at http://interactivepython.org/runestone/default/user/register. Enter StudentCSP as the course name. Be sure to record your username. We find that users often forget what they entered and assume it was their e-mail address — and it may not have been. You can also choose to sign in with your account on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, or several others.
• Then go to http://interactivepython.org/runestone/admin/index and select “Create your own Course”.
• Create a unique name for your course (use your school name and StudentCSP and year maybe), add a description, and your institution, and then select “CS Principles: Big Ideas in Programming by Mark Guzdial, Barbara Ericson, and Briana Morrison“.
• Leave the rest as defaults and click the “Submit” button.  This will build a custom version of the student ebook for your students and it will have a unique URL and course name.  You will be listed as the instructor and can look at the log files and view other information on the instructor page (you can get to this by clicking on the icon that looks like a head and shoulders and the top right of your screen when you are in the ebook).