An engaging cs1 curriculum using bridges

Early programming courses such as CS1 are an important time to capture the interest of students while imparting critical technical knowledge. Yet many CS1 courses are being taught using toy assignments and activities that tend to make students uninterested or doubt the usefulness of the content. In this poster, we demonstrate an enriching experience for students by coupling interesting datasets with visual representations and interactive applications, without having to change the content of that course. Our approach utilizes extensions to BRIDGES, an API in use for sophomore level CS courses for the past 5 years. BRIDGES provides easy access to external datasets and helps build interactive applications. The assignments we present are all scaffolded in a way that can be directly integrated into most early programming courses to make routine topics compelling and exciting.