Incorporating Practical Computing Skills Into a Supplemental CS2 Problem Solving Course

Abstract

Computer scientists are often expected to obtain practical technical skills on their own. We have updated our supplemental CS2 problem-solving course to introduce students to technical skills across a variety of computer science topics in order to expand their incidental skills that often fall through the cracks. The goal of the course is for students to feel comfortable taking their problem-solving skills to unfamiliar computing situations. This course helps bridge the gap for students with less computing experience by introducing them to current computer science tools and demystifying potentially intimidating topics such as version control, security, command line tools, web development, and machine learning. This experience report details our motivation and approaches for this contemporary problem-solving course. We discuss outcomes regarding student perceptions of the course, and our innovative approach of measuring student comfort in situations that require solving problems with computer science such as undergraduate research, hackathons, and personal programming projects.