Across the United States and Canada, universities and colleges are facing significant increases in undergraduate computer science (CS) enrollments. This surge has exceeded all previous CS program booms and there is a general sense that the current enrollment growth is substantially different than that of the mid-1980s and late 1990s. The Computing Research Association (CRA)’s Generation CS Study sheds a light on the growing enrollment trends and their impact on computer science units, diversity, enrollment management strategies, and more.
Although different institutions, large and small, are experiencing the enrollment increases in different ways, many programs are already operating at or beyond their maximum capacity. To help departments and faculty deal with this capacity crunch, this Scaling Capacity website is intended to provide a platform for sharing technological and pedagogical interventions for addressing capacity challenges. These practices are not designed to be ‘one size fits all’, but rather offer a variety of solutions derived from specific university needs.
This intervention list includes recipients of Google’s CS Capacity Awards and other self-nominated programs.
If you would like to nominate a CS Capacity Growth Approach, please fill out this form. Submissions will be evaluated and selected based on their potential for broad impact and interest. Due to additional constraints, CRA-E cannot guarantee that all submissions will be highlighted.
Students are trained to become effective instructors by tutoring their peers, first individually and then in small groups. This pipeline is supported by a new student-led organization called CS Mentors, a new pedagogy course, new scheduling software, and new course policies.
The MaGE Training Course prepares students for educating, mentoring, and supporting others in inclusive ways. The course raises awareness of the role of social identity in learning, emphasizes active learning within computer science, and prepares students to be technical peer mentors.
The goal is to provide better feedback to our students in auto-grading situations. The intervention comprises an added map between assignments and concepts. The mapping tool enables educators to point out which concepts students have failed to demonstrate in a code submissions and provide students with feedback on the concept or concepts they have failed to understand.
The goal is to effectively utilize undergraduates engaged as peer teaching fellows (PTFs) for introductory computer science courses. The Triangle Peer Teaching Fellows are gathering and analyzing data on the use of PTFs, developing tools to support PTF pedagogy, and developing evidence-based training materials.
The SPARC project has created a self-paced learning environment that blends online learning, automated assessment, collaborative practice, and peer-supported learning. SPARC delivers educational material online, encourages students to practice programming in groups, and allows them to demonstrate their knowledge individually at any time.
We gather and analyze volumes of data about our student body from a variety of sources (registrar, surveys, etc), to determine who our students are, what motivates them, why they succeed, and why they fail.
