Weekly Open-Ended Exercises and Student Motivation in CS1
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
Improving student engagement and learning within introductory Computer Science (CS1) courses has been heavily studied within CS Education (CSE) research due to their fundamental role in a student’s early experiences with learning foundational CS concepts. One issue with many CS1 courses is that the practice of standardized grading leads to limited opportunities for students to find personal relevance within school projects, which could be demotivating for beginner students. This paper examines the impact of incorporating opportunities for creative thinking into a CS1 course through the use of weekly open-ended exercises. Data was collected from 284 students in a CS1 course, where roughly half of the students completed weekly exercises which included an open-ended aspect that allowed them to make their own decisions about their projects. The other half completed similar exercises but with a specifically defined, closed-ended checklist of requirements. Although no effect on academic performance was found, an analysis of survey data collected throughout the course revealed a significant connection between open-ended exercises and increased motivation, especially in terms of confidence and satisfaction. A deeper look at each particular exercise showed variances in how motivating an exercise was based on time in the semester and structure of the exercise, revealing important lessons about the design of effective open-ended CS1 exercises.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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