Overview

The Bridging Real-world Infrastructure Designed to Goal-align, Engage, and Stimulate (BRIDGES) project is directed at improving the retention of sophomore students in Computer Science by (1) introducing real-world datasets (Facebook, Twitter, IMDB (Actor/Movie), Earthquake, Stock Charts, etc) into course projects involving computer science data structures, and (2) facilitating peer mentoring of sophomores by senior CS students in shared lab experiences that involve the use of the BRIDGES infrastructure in software development.

BRIDGES Client Design

BRIDGES client side design loosely follows the basic data structure elements implemented and described in ``A Practical Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis" by C.A. Shaffer (http://people.cs.vt.edu/shaffer/Book/). These elements are augmented to contain visual properties that are controlled by the user to customize the visual representation of the constructed data structure. Once a a data structure is ready to be visualized, related BRIDGES server calls are made to send a reprsentation of the data structure to BRIDGES server.

BRIDGES Server Design.

BRIDGES server implements a combination of technologies (MongoDB, Node, d3JS(visualization) to receive a data structure representation for visualization. These are largely transparent to the user and involves the user being directed to a web page for viewing the data structure. Attention has been paid to provide meaningful error messages to the user in case problems are encountered in the process.

API Descriptions.

See the accompanying pages for detailed description of the BRIDGES classes

Sponsorship/Funding.

BRIDGES is funded by the National Science Foundation through NSF TUES Project DUE-1245841 and IUSE Projects DUE-1726809, DUE-214381

Contacts:

Kalpathi Subramanian, krs@u.nosp@m.ncc..nosp@m.edu, Jamie Payton, payto.nosp@m.n@te.nosp@m.mple..nosp@m.edu, Erik Saule, esaul.nosp@m.e@un.nosp@m.cc.ed.nosp@m.u, Paula Goolkasian, pagoo.nosp@m.lka@.nosp@m.uncc..nosp@m.edu (and previously Michael Youngblood, gmyou.nosp@m.ngbl.nosp@m.ood@g.nosp@m.mail.nosp@m..com, Robert Kosara, rkosa.nosp@m.ra@t.nosp@m.ablea.nosp@m.u.co.nosp@m.m)

Department of Computer Science, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC.