CSE 142

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Practicum: guided programming practice

Here at UWCSE, over the last couple quarters, we've developed a tool for students to learn and practice certain types of structured, algorithmic problems. It's a distant cousin of PracticeIt, and also of the 190 labs -- all of them are intended to provide additional and different ways for you, the student, to better learn the course material (on top of section, the textbook, and the homework assignments). Practicum is targeted at providing more explanations to you while you are learning, and providing less explanations to you as you gain experience solving each type of problem.

Practicum is under active development. If you have feedback or suggestions, please use the links in the tool to give us feedback. It can be about the user interface, the problem-solving workflow, or anythnig else that you like or don't like about the tool.

Practicum Experiment in 15au

This quarter, we're running an experiment to determine if it the new tool is helpful. The experiment works as follows:

In several of the lab sessions this quarter, some lab sections will use our standard lab material, and some will use Practicum. If you are in a lab section, then after using a slightly different version of the lab documents, you will be given a short (5-minute) quiz. This outcome of this quiz has no effect on your CSE142 course grades, but you will receive feedback about your performance on the quiz.

After the relevant labs, the Practicum practice tool will be made available to the class at large -- we believe that it will prove especially helpful for exam preparation.

Lab Quizzes

The affected labs will include a short quiz. Your answers on the quiz will not affect your CSE142 course grade in any way. However, we do ask that you do your own work, and try your best, so that we can better assess the helpfulness of the tool.

The quiz will be on paper, and given during the last 5 minutes of lab section. While the quiz doesn't count for a grade, we will score the quiz, and give you feedback on how you performed.

Consent Form

During the lab, or when you visit the Practicum page, you will encounter a consent form screen. This consent form contains the researchers statement; please read it and respond to it. You can change you consent decision at any time by clicking your username in the top right-hand corner of the screen in Practicum, and selecting 'Consent Form'.

Note that whether you agree or disagree to the consent form does not affect the lab material that you will use; nor does it affect whether you are allowed to use Practicum -- it will be available to all students following the appropriate lab section.

The consent form also does not control what data we collect. By virtue of taking the course, you are agreeing to allow us to collect some data -- for example, we collect your assignment scores so that we can compute course grades at the end of the term. We also collect usage data from the various tools we use and use that internally to improve the tools, and also improve our courses; to be clear, we don't share this data with anyone, we simply use it to administer the course and improve the way we teach it.

The consent form controls whether the researchers may use and share your anonymized data in a research study regarding the effectiveness of this new tool, Practicum.

Your anonymized data is likely to include your:

Your anonymized data will NOT include:

You can only respond to the consent form in the Practicum tool, but you can view a copy of the consent form text here.

Contact Info

If you have any questions about the research study, you should contact the researchers:

If you have questions about your rights as a research subject, you should contact: If you have other questions regarding Practicum, you may contact: