2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Powerful Labs Environment for Computer Science Courses

Presented at Programming Education 1

Programming assignments are key to any computer science course. In today's digital landscape of education, summative assessments, often called labs, are assigned on a weekly basis to students. The goals of these assessments are often to reinforce and to evaluate mastery of the concepts taught in the course. Upon graduation, students are tasked with programming complex projects. A key aspect of a CS student's success in the real world is their ability to develop complex software in professional IDEs (integrated development environments). In this paper we describe a new and powerful labs environment that enables students to master their skills in software development through a cloud-based IDE with support for over 50 programming languages. This labs environment supports an auto-grader and professional unit testing frameworks. Additionally, the labs environment also provides instructors the opportunity to collaborate with students in real-time. We present student usage and behavior data from use of these labs in 300 introductory programming courses across 183 universities.

Authors

Dr. Chi Yan Daniel Leung zyBooks, A Wiley Brand [biography]

Chi Yan (Daniel) Leung is the Content Software Engineer (Labs lead) at zyBooks. He oversees the content creation and maintenance of labs across different titles at zyBooks. Before joining zyBooks, he was a lecturer at the School of Engineering at the University of California at Merced. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Vision from the University of California at Merced.
Joe Mazzone zyBooks, A Wiley Brand [biography]

Joe is the learning tools and zyLabs product development lead at zyBooks. Joe is also an adjunct professor at the University of Rhode Island teaching software engineering. Prior to working at zyBooks, Joe was an award-winning career and technical educator, teaching computer and software engineering to high school students. He is President of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) of Rhode Island and is a member of the CS4RI (Computer Science for Rhode Island) board, where he serves as a voice for CS educators and the computing industry.
Ms. Efthymia Kazakou zyBooks, A Wiley Brand [biography]

Efthymia Kazakou is Sr. Assessments manager at zyBooks, a startup spun-off from UC Riverside and acquired by Wiley. zyBooks develops interactive, web-native learning materials for STEM courses. Efthymia oversees the development and maintenance of all zyBo
Chelsea Gordon zyBooks, A Wiley Brand [biography]

Chelsea Gordon received her PhD in Cognitive Science at University of California, Merced in 2019. Chelsea works as a research scientist for zyBooks, a Wiley company that creates and publishes interactive, web-native textbooks in STEM.
Dr. Alex Daniel Edgcomb zyBooks, A Wiley Brand [biography]

Alex Edgcomb is Sr. Software Engineer at zyBooks, a startup spun-off from UC Riverside and acquired by Wiley. zyBooks develops interactive, web-native learning materials for STEM courses. Alex actively studies and publishes the efficacy of web-native lear
Dr. Yamuna Rajasekhar zyBooks, A Wiley Brand [biography]

Yamuna Rajasekhar is Director of Content Development at zyBooks, a Wiley Brand. She is an author and contributor to various zyBooks titles, and leads authoring and research across all disciplines. She was formerly an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Miami University. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UNC Charlotte.

Download paper (2.65 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session

For those interested in:

computer science