Developing a Rubric for a Creative CS Principles Lab

Abstract

The "Beauty and Joy of Computing" Computer Science Principles class has inspired many new teachers to learn to teach creative computing classes in high schools. However, new computer science teachers feel under-prepared to grade open-ended programming assignments and support their students' successful learning. Rubrics have widely been used to help teaching assistants grade programs and are a promising way to support new teachers to learn how to grade BJC programs. In this paper, we adapt general coding criteria from auto-graders to a lab where students write code to draw a brick wall. We tested the rubric on student assignments and showed that we can achieve high inter-rater agreement with the refined rubric.