How Can DEAP OER Resources Help?
We understand that your time as a faculty member is precious, with countless responsibilities demanding your attention. That’s why we’ve condensed our active learning strategies into user-friendly and concise 2-page handouts. Here’s why our handouts are the ideal choice for busy educators:
- Easy to Implement: Each handout provides step-by-step instructions on how to apply active learning strategies in your classroom. No need to spend hours researching or designing lesson plans. We’ve done the work for you!
- Comprehensive yet Concise: Our handouts ensure you have access to a wide array of active learning strategies tailored to different subjects and learning objectives, all in just two pages. Emphasize active engagement without overwhelming yourself or your students!
- Time-Saving: Gone are the days of searching through lengthy textbooks or online resources to find the right activity for your lesson. Our handouts curate the best strategies, saving you valuable time that can be better spent on other important aspects of your teaching.
Resources on Competencies and Instructional Strategies that Support Competency Integration
Cross-Disciplinary Skills: Overview
Cross-disciplinary skills, such as communication and critical thinking, are skills that are domain agnostic that can be transferred across domains and contexts. This handout provides an overview of cross-disciplinary skills and how they can be developed across the program duration using the spiral curriculum.
Dispositions: Overview
Dispositions, such as lifelong learning orientation and perseverance, are personal qualities that determine how a person chooses to act or behave by knowing why and when a task or behavior is needed and motivating appropriate action. This handout provides an overview of dispositions and how they can be developed across the program duration using the spiral curriculum.
Case-Based Learning: Overview
Case-based learning is an instructional approach that uses real-world scenarios or problems as a basis for students to apply their knowledge and develop critical thinking skills. This method encourages active participation and facilitates deeper understanding by placing students in the role of problem-solvers within authentic contexts.
DEAP Flipped Classroom: Overview
The flipped classroom model reverses traditional learning environments by delivering instructional content, often online, outside of the classroom. It transforms class time into an interactive learning session where students engage in practical applications, discussions, and collaborative activities, thereby deepening their understanding of the subject matter.
Scaffolding in Computing Science: Overview
Scaffolding, as described in the document, is a teaching approach where instructors provide temporary support to help learners achieve tasks they cannot accomplish alone. Rooted in Vygotsky’s theory, scaffolding bridges the gap between a learner’s current abilities and their potential development. In computing education, this strategy is especially valuable for helping students grasp complex programming concepts and problem-solving techniques. As learners develop competence, the support is gradually reduced, promoting independent learning. Key components of scaffolding include breaking down complex tasks, offering targeted support and challenges, fostering collaborative learning, and encouraging reflective practice. The document also stresses the importance of adjusting scaffolding based on ongoing feedback and the learners’ evolving needs.
Gamification: Overview
Gamification uses elements like points, badges, levels, and challenges to make learning more engaging. In computing education, it helps students build technical and problem-solving skills through interactive experiences. Research shows gamification boosts interest and participation, but thoughtful design is important to avoid distractions and ensure clear benefits. When aligned with learning goals, such as teamwork or conceptual understanding, gamified activities like virtual farm or city traffic simulations can enhance programming, algorithms, and cybersecurity lessons. With careful integration, gamification can make learning both effective and enjoyable.
Scenario-based Assessment
Scenario-based assessment helps computing students examine professional dispositions through realistic narratives that mirror workplace challenges and decision-making contexts. This resource explains how instructors can use concise written, visual, or video scenarios to prompt reflection, support classroom discussion, and assess students’ understanding of dispositions such as teamwork, ethics, initiative, and lifelong learning. Instructors can adapt the scenarios for multiple-choice assessments, follow-up reasoning prompts, or discussion-based activities that reveal how students interpret professional behavior in computing contexts.
Resources on Introducing Cross-Disciplinary Skills into Curriculum
Teamwork Cross-Disciplinary Skill: Overview
Teamwork skill involves the ability to effectively collaborate and communicate with others to achieve a common goal, demonstrating empathy, responsibility, and adaptability within a group setting. It is essential for navigating complex projects and diverse work environments, fostering innovation and problem-solving through collective effort.
Embedding Teamwork in Your Course: Overview
Looking to integrate teamwork meaningfully into your course? This guide offers practical, research-backed strategies to help students develop essential skills like communication, collaboration, and critical thinking through well-structured team activities. From single-class sessions to capstone projects, you will find flexible examples and tools to set clear expectations and boost student engagement.
Companion Resources:
Persona Interviews in Software Engineering Playlist
Persona interview videos help software engineering students practice designing for real users rather than an assumed “average user.” Students analyze personas with different ages, backgrounds, language preferences, technology experiences, accessibility needs, privacy concerns, and daily habits to identify user goals, frustrations, usability barriers, and design requirements.
This activity also supports cross-disciplinary skills and dispositions for computing professionals, including user-centered analysis, ethical reasoning, communication, accessibility awareness, humility, compassion, honesty, and responsibility. The personas were created using Synthesia AI for practice. When possible, real user interviews are recommended because they provide more authentic and context-specific insights, but AI-generated personas can help students build early skills in analyzing users and connecting persona insights to journey maps.
Video-Based Quiz in H5
In this activity, students will watch a short video on how to give and receive constructive feedback and apply the ideas to computing and design thinking projects. As they watch, students will respond to embedded questions that ask them to identify effective feedback practices, such as balancing critique with support, encouraging self-reflection, and using feedback to improve performance. The goal is to help students see feedback as a professional skill that strengthens collaboration, code quality, design decisions, and continuous improvement.
Strategies for Giving and Receiving Feedback in Computing (Video)
In this video, students will learn practical strategies for giving and receiving constructive feedback in computing contexts, including software development, cybersecurity, database design, and IT teamwork. Students will explore how to make feedback clear, specific, actionable, and respectful, while also learning how to respond to feedback with openness, professionalism, and a focus on improvement. These skills help students strengthen their technical work, collaborate more effectively, and build the professional habits needed in computing careers.
Journey Map and Persona Templates.pptx
In this activity, students will use an interactive Microsoft PowerPoint template to build a persona and journey map for a software product or system. The template guides students to identify the user’s goals, needs, frustrations, skills, and context, then map the user’s steps, emotions, pain points, and design opportunities across the experience.
This activity also helps students practice cross-disciplinary skills and dispositions for computing professionals, including user-centered analysis, communication, ethical reasoning, accessibility awareness, empathy, humility, and responsibility. By working directly in the PowerPoint template, students can visually organize user insights and connect them to software design decisions that are technically functional, inclusive, and responsive to real human needs.
Reflection
Reflection helps computing students move beyond completing tasks to understanding how they learn, solve problems, make decisions, and improve over time. This resource offers practical ways to embed brief, purposeful reflection before, during, and after labs, programming assignments, group projects, design reviews, and capstone experiences. Instructors can use the examples, prompts, and assessment ideas to support metacognition, collaboration, technical growth, and professional readiness.
Working with Peers in Computing (Video)
This video explainer supports computing students in developing the cross-disciplinary skills and professional dispositions needed for effective collaboration in technical environments. Students explore how to clarify roles, communicate about shared work, give and receive constructive feedback, revise code based on peer input, and navigate common challenges in group projects, code review, and shared repositories. By emphasizing teamwork, communication, responsibility, humility, and professional growth, this video helps students understand that strong computing practice depends not only on technical ability, but also on the ability to work productively and respectfully with others.
Script: NDA Ethical Dilemma
H5P Case Study
The NDA Ethical Dilemma is an interactive H5P case study designed to help learners explore professional responsibility and ethical decision-making in engineering and computing contexts. Through a realistic workplace scenario, learners follow Emma, an engineer navigating tensions between sharing expertise, respecting a non-disclosure agreement, and responding to team expectations. The case invites learners to make decisions, receive feedback, and reflect on legal, ethical, and professional communication issues that may arise in practice.
Resources on Introducing Dispositions into Curriculum
Research-based List of Dispositions
- These dispositions were generated based on a Systematic Literature Review and interviews of computing professionals and managers, as part of the DEAPening Employer-Academia Partnership project.
- The DEAP Project is based on work partly supported by the National Science Foundation under Awards 2110771, 2110788, 2110815, 2110823, 2110850, 2111097, 2111157, and 2111435. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Perseverance: Overview
- Perseverance is a key skill for student success in computing and future careers. This informational resource provides straightforward strategies and examples, like coding challenges, debugging tasks, and peer feedback, to help students build resilience, stay motivated, and work through difficulties. Here, you will find practical ways to integrate perseverance into everyday coursework.
Perseverance Role Play Activity
- The Tech Support Troubleshooters role-play is a practical, low-tech classroom activity that helps computing students build essential soft skills through realistic troubleshooting scenarios. Students take turns acting as IT support and users, practicing perseverance, as well as communication, and problem-solving under pressure. This activity bridges technical knowledge with professional skills, preparing students for real-world client interactions.
A Guide to Using Agentic Personas to Assess Dispositions in Computing Courses
The Agentic Persona Framework provides a practical approach for assessing dispositions in computing education by making students’ agency visible through observable behaviors rather than relying solely on traditional grades. Drawing on Tubino and Cain (2024), the framework uses three developmental personas—Entry, Developing, and Agentic—to describe how students engage with learning tasks, make decisions, respond to feedback, and demonstrate independence. The guide explains how instructors can translate dispositions into rubric criteria and tiered learning activities. Through examples from programming, cybersecurity, and capstone projects, it illustrates how different levels of agency can be recognized and assessed, helping students understand their growth while supporting more meaningful evaluation of professional dispositions in computing courses.
Resources for Integrating AI into the Curriculum
AI Literacy
AI literacy helps computing students understand, use, evaluate, and reflect on artificial intelligence technologies with both technical skill and ethical judgment. This resource introduces three adaptable lesson modules that guide students in using AI as a learning partner through prompt engineering, model comparison, AI-supported debugging, and reflection on honesty, humility, courage, and integrity. Instructors can use these materials to help students strengthen programming understanding, recognize knowledge gaps, and develop responsible habits for learning with AI.
Advanced AI Use for Debugging and Learning Lesson Plan 3
This pair- and team-based lesson helps CS1/CS2 students move beyond basic AI use by practicing advanced prompting strategies for debugging and learning. Through prompt surgery, iterative refinement, chain-of-thought-style prompting, persona prompting, and a team prompt challenge, students learn how to ask AI for explanations that build transferable understanding rather than simply produce corrected code. The lesson also reinforces honesty, humility, courage, and integrity as students examine how responsible AI use supports deeper learning, better debugging habits, and long-term growth as computing professionals.
Lesson Plan 1: Using AI as a Learning Partner in CS1 – Lesson Plan
This hands-on CS1 lesson helps students use AI as a learning partner rather than an answer machine. Through an honesty contract, pair-based prompt writing, beginner-friendly programming tasks, and anonymous question practice, students learn to distinguish effective prompts from ineffective ones while recognizing AI’s capabilities and limitations. The lesson emphasizes honesty, humility, and courage as students practice asking better questions, documenting what they learn, and focusing on understanding instead of simply getting answers.
Lesson Plan 2: Evaluating AI Outputs for Debugging and Learning
This hands-on CS1/CS2 lesson helps students evaluate AI-generated debugging support rather than accepting AI responses at face value. Through paired model comparison, buggy code analysis, and a structured evaluation worksheet, students practice checking accuracy, clarity, teaching value, and limitations across different AI tools. The lesson supports lifelong learning by helping students build verification habits, seek multiple sources, question assumptions, and focus on understanding programming concepts instead of memorizing tool-generated answers.