It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time Suzanne (no last name given) at a university somewhere in the southwest US

A CS 1 assignment that seemed like a good idea at the time in spring 2000 And the time in fall 2000 And the time in fall 2001 And the time in fall 2002 And the time in fall 2003 And the time in fall 2004 And the time in fall 2005 And the time in fall 2006 … See a pattern??

Alternate Title… My sad tale of assigning (and assigning!) an interesting, multi-part problem for students to have a chance to explore algorithms, practice problem-solving, practice combining control structures, understand the use of methods and parameters, and have fun in a CS 1 class! Or so I thought….

It all started in spring 2000 Assigned “Flesch Readability Index” problem (from Cay Horstmann’s Computing Concepts with Java Essentials) Calculates a value that indicates the average reading level (5 th grader through Law school grad) – 84.6*(number of syllables / number of words) – 1.015*(number of words / number of sentences).

Write a class - “Paragraph” Store the paragraph as a String Idea – build up a paragraph: given a String, find the number of words, sentences, syllables and append it to any previously entered text Methods to return number of syllables (private), words, sentences, lines; to calculate Flesch Index, educational level of audience Students griped…OK, on the right track… Lots of questions…good, they’re looking at it… More than usual didn’t do it!...not so good

So – next time, Fall 2000 Hmmm…this is a good problem, how can it be more fun? (finding syllables was a problem) How about finding palindromes? And converting words to Pig Latin is fun, right? (Igpay Atinlay!) Still build up a paragraph, count words, sentences (“.”), questions (“?”), exclamations (“!”) – call a method multiple times with different parameters.

Fall 2000 Issues Now a problem finding groups of consonants for Pig Latin And how do you find a vowel? So, still a bit of frustration and higher than usual number of dropped assignments. Undergrad Section Leaders – From “This is a great problem!” to “Some students won’t even try!” to “Half my section dropped this one.””

And so it went…maybe if I give more support this will work… Fall 2001 – Paragraph: back to Flesch Index Fall 2002 – Paragraph: back to palindromes and Pig Latin, don’t worry about capitalizations Fall 2003 – Paragraph: gave pseudocode for Pig Latin Fall 2004 – BunchOText: work in pairs; 2 points extra credit for handling capitalizations

Fall 2005 – TextFun: did part of it in a closed lab; pairs Seven times is more than enough – that’s it! Fall 2006 – WordProcessor (Section Leaders convinced me to use it again): did all of the Pig Latin part in a closed lab and gave out the solution; pairs Fall 2007 – gave it as an extra credit project only; only 10 out of 165 tried it Fini

Class info and trends Large classes - ~150 to ~230 Usually about 1/3 didn’t do this assignment (could drop one assignment) Drop rate on previous assignment about 1/5 Slightly more did the following assignment, but not as many as before it Some (small) number of people never did another assignment!

Lessons Learned Undergraduate Section Leaders don’t always know more than I do about what their peers will like (or else they want them to suffer, too) Students didn’t successfully cheat on it Some people never learn – mainly me Pig Latin is not the universal language of fun Sometimes we just have to let things go Maybe I should have done something with pirates? They love pirates…