High School BRIDGES: Visualizations of Data, Data Structures, and More

ABSTRACTHS BRIDGES (https://bridgesuncc.github.io/bridges-hs/) is a collection of programming projects, including "student scaffolds" and "teacher walkthroughs", that use UNC Charlotte's BRIDGES Java Libraries (https://bridgesuncc.github.io/) in order to enable students' creations of data structure- and real world data visualizations. In this Demo, we show sample projects from the HS BRIDGES collection (https://bridgesuncc.github.io/bridges-hs/). We discuss the pedagogy behind the design of our instructional materials, the importance of our "teacher walkthroughs" as supports for teachers who are new to computer science OR who are new to teaching, and the meaningful learning outcomes that students achieve as they solve project problems. Programming agility and understanding of data structures flourish when engaging problem solving challenges, scaffolded learning materials, and dynamic visualizations converge. Overall, we aim to engage session participants with HS BRIDGES projects during the session, and then back home with their students. We've recently published our collection via the Web and we are eager to share the joy of cool visualizations that make data come alive. This work is supported by NSF TUES and NSF IUSE.