The Use of an Open-Ended Project to Improve the Student Experience in First Year Programming
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prior to 2010, Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering students at the University of Waterloo were taught an introductory programming course using C++ in first year. Historically, the emphasis was on learning syntax; practising problem-solving was a distant second priority. In addition, many students were noticeably disengaged in lectures, and the assessments used were not authentic.Starting in 2010, a course project was implemented to address these concerns. The project was immediately well received by students, as evidenced by a noticeable number of students going well beyond the minimum project requirements and the variety of projects implemented. Since the project was introduced, the students have been able to successfully answer less structured final exam questions. The increase in problem-solving and thinking skills more than offsets the reduction in language-specific facts. The logistics, challenges and resources required to implement a project of this scope will be described
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it