2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Discord, a social platform originally targeted for the videogame community, is becoming more and more popular as a tool for group projects, class discussions, and community for computer science (CS) students. At our university, a group of undergraduate CS students started a public, unofficial CS departmental server in 2017 where students can join and talk to others in their classes under a thin veil of anonymity. Through the years, this Discord server has grown, it now houses 2,353 current undergraduate and graduate students, current university professors, alumni working within the industry, and CS enthusiasts not related to the institution. In this work-in-progress paper, we explore how CS students at a 4-year institution in the Southeastern United States utilize their unofficial departmental Discord server to complement and enhance their education. We scraped four semesters’ worth of general and upper-level course-related conversational data from this server to analyze how this long-standing community comes together to support one another in the journey to obtain their undergraduate degrees. Our content analysis is currently ongoing, but we generally expect to see alumni and professors providing advice and guidance in course channels, alumni providing their experience and insights into the job market, students providing feedback about course content and offerings, and students collaborating on projects and exam or quiz study guides. In addition, we expect to see students organizing class meet-ups and group study sessions inside and outside of the Discord server. However, more themes may emerge through our analysis. From this, we aim to show the benefits of non-institutionally organized, student-led communities and provide recommendations to help facilitate building an online Discord community.