Introductory Programming Meets the Real World: Using Real Problems and Data in CS1

Too many students in introductory programming classes fail to understand the significance and utility of the concepts being taught. Their low motivation impacts their learning. One contributing factor is pedagogy that emphasizes computing for its own sake and assign-ments that are abstract, such as computing the factorial function. Many educators have improved on such traditional approaches by teaching concepts in contexts that students find more relevant, such as games, robots, and media. Now, it is time to take the next step. In this special session, participants will develop and discuss ways to teach introductory programming by means of real-world data analysis problems from science, engineering, business, and the humanities. Students can be motivated to learn programming in order to analyze DNA, predict the outcome of elections, detect fraudulent data, suggest friends in a social network, determine the authorship of texts, and more (see Section 3.4 for more examples)