Assignment Guru Program
Create assignments that demonstrate the positive impact of computing!
What is Assignment Guru?
The Assignment Guru Program aims to create assignments for CS111 and CS112 that demonstrate the positive social impact of computing. Assignment Gurus are important members of our team and bring fresh ideas, diverse perspectives, and their own skills to the programming assignments they create. Incorporating assignments with social responsibility and visual applications into early computing courses can be interesting and motivating for students and can help them relate assignments with concepts they’ve seen in their own lives.
This program is supported by the Advancing Women in Computer Science initiative, which is run in partnership with the Department of Computer Science, DIMACS, and Douglass Residential College.
Why Get Involved?
There are many reasons! But to name a few, being an Assignment Developer lets you…
- Gain project management and development skills. You’ll be able to shape your own assignment into one we can use for CS111 and CS112, from start to finish. We follow coding and documentation standards similar to those in the industry.
- Create assignments with real-world and social impact applications. Over the past few years, our Assignment Developers have made some interesting assignments based on promoting ethics and social justice as well as visual applications that help relate the structures we use in class to real-world concepts.
- Collaborate with peers, faculty and mentors. You work closely with mentors through weekly check-in meetings, and you work on assignments in a pair or small group.
- Contribute to a more inclusive and welcoming CS environment at Rutgers. Your assignments directly contribute to how students perceive CS and programming in general.
- Have fun! Creating assignments is a challenge but a fun and interesting one. You get to work on the “other side” of creating assignments, all while collaborating with others!
Meet the Developers!
Yashas Ravi
Yashas' assignment, "Infinity War," was published as a Nifty Assignment at SIGCSE 2024, a conference centered around CS education.
Jeremy Hui
As our 2024 Guru of the Year, Jeremy mentored other developers while using his creativity and skills to create several fun assignments!
Mary Buist
Mary was our Helping Hand in 2024 and as a mentor, she supported developers and mentors alike with helpful pointers and guidance.
Our Process
Ideate
Come up with an assignment idea you’d like to try out! We like ideas that are centered around ethics and visual applications.
Translate
Translate your idea into an assignment: this involves turning concepts from your idea into classes and methods.
Build and Test
Create files, materials, and documentation for students, and test your code thoroughly to make sure it works!
Release
Your assignment gets released to students in CS111 and CS112! We provide credit to authors on our course websites.
How to Get Involved
We usually work in June and July to create assignments and expect that Assignment Developers have completed CS112 (Data Structures) by the start of the program in June.
Applications to join our Summer 2025 cohort will open in Spring 2025.