Computer Science Assessment

It is my belief that any assessment practice should encourage and reward creativity. Teaching Computer Science can be an incredibly rewarding experience when you encourage students to use this knowledge of technology to pursue their own passions. But the question arises, how do you assess creativity. I would argue that we do not assess creativity itself but instead reward the attempt. I tell my students that it is ok to experiment and fail. An epic failure will NOT affect your mark as long as you still demonstrate the necessary skills in the attempt.

Below are links to two documents to help you get started.

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The first is a document specific to the Alberta Computer Science curriculum. It is a collaboratively created document titled Assessing Alberta Computer Science Education, where assessment mechanisms are described for each of our credits (similar to units).

The second is a document I created called the Computer Science Assessment Taxonomy. It assumes that I have examined my curriculum and determined a set of "basic skills" and "advanced skills" and articulated these two my students. It then describes assignments as being prescriptive or creative. A prescriptive project is one where a student is given a fairly specific task such as 'make a text based rock, paper, scissors game'. This assignment is not going to be easy for some students but if the student has a strong grasp of IF statements and advanced boolean logic, they will have a good idea how to proceed. A creative project, using the same skills would be 'make a dice game involving multiple dice'. This document is a working draft but I thought I would share it with you after getting some positive feedback from colleagues.