Week 4: Literature Review Continued

Last week I had planned to increase the number of literature reviews I would do, however, we have begun to address the tasks that are on Trello. On the in progress portion of Trello, the tasks were to begin identifying IoT structures (as part of task 1) and to create and maintain a website for the project. So I was only able to get to one literature review. I will write a more complete blog post on the task 1 in the next blog post when I have researched more.

I read BRIDGES: A System to Enable Creation of Engaging Data Structures Assignments with Real-World Data and Visualizations by David Burlinson, Mihai Mehedint, Chris Grafer, Kalpathi Subramanian, Jamie Payton, Paula Goolkasian, Michael Youngblood, and Robert Kosara.

The focus of this research is "BRIDGES [...] a software infrastructure designed to enable the creation of more engaging assignments in introductory data structures courses by providing students with a simplified API that allows them to populate their own data structure implementations with live, real-world, and interesting data sets." This software is supposed to help students visualize the execution of algorithms to understand them better and they can produce their own implementations that they can share them online with their peers.

The goal, like the goal of other paper, is to retain computer science (CS) students because as we are all aware, CS program retention rates are not that great. BRIDGES giver students access to real live data sets unlike traditional programming assignments that give you synthetic data. You can also view and debug code while seeing a visual. Below I have included how the researchers explain how BRIDGES works, along with pictures.

The research will continue and be extended to include peer mentoring, external data sources and extended evaluations.