22FA_CAC210A-Data Structures and Media Comp

"The proliferation of navigation apps is causing traffic chaos. It's time to restore order."

Defending the power grid from physical and cyber attacks.

Fooling biological and computer brains.

15 year old boy becomes so ill that doctors have to induce a coma. Months and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of testing can't determine a diagnosis...then, the computer scientists step up to the challenge.

The new touchscreen.

These houses can be built for $4,000 allowing homes to be built for those who can't afford one.

This semester our class will be participating in a National Science Foundation funded project titled “Extended BRIDGES: Addressing Preparation Gaps and Promoting Culturally Relevant Teaching to Support Diverse Groups in Early CS Courses”. We will be using the BRIDGES infrastructure for at least three of your homework assignments. BRIDGES provides students with a simplified API that allows them to populate their own data structure implementations with real-world data, spanning disciplines such as science, entertainment, multi-media, literature and social networks. Secondly, BRIDGES provides the ability for students to easily visualize the data structures that they have created as part of their routine classroom exercises, which can promote better understanding of the data structure and its underlying algorithms.

The project team from UNC Charlotte would like you to participate by filling out an online survey after completing each of the homework assignments. The survey will take 5-10 minutes and will ask you a series of questions to provide feedback about the assignment, such as how relevant, interesting and engaging the assignments are and as well as how long it took you to do the assignment and whether it was related to your interest in computing. In addition, at the beginning and end of the semester you will also take an online computer experience survey that will test your readiness for learning about data structure/algorithm and any changes that occur throughout the semester. Your name will not be used on any of the surveys. Instead, I as the instructor, will assign a code that you will use every time you access the link to the Qualtrics website to respond to a survey.

Your consent to participate is especially important as well because the project team will request from me your project grades and course grade. Again, let me emphasize that I will send that data with a student code rather than your name. Thus, your answers in the survey will have no bearing on your course grade. Your individual responses to the online surveys will be read only by a project evaluator who is not in computer science. She will send back summaries but not individual responses and your names will not be used for any of the surveys or data that are collected.

I encourage you to participate because the benefits of participation are the opportunity to apply data structure concepts to real world data sets and to provide some baseline information about a new approach to teaching data structures/algorithms.

If you are interested in participating, you must click on the Qualtrics link and fill out the informed consent sheet.