Introductory programming remains a significant challenge for many students. A large factor impacting success is each student's motivation to engage with assessment and practice exercises. One strategy for improving student engagement is to offer multiple assessment options. These should cover the same concepts, and be of equivalent difficulty, but be themed according to a variety of interests (e.g., games, data science, hardware). By providing such flexibility, students are empowered to engage in learning activities and assessment tasks which are more aligned with their interests and future aspirations.

This project aims to build and evaluate a framework for designing equivalent assessment options. Possible activities include:

• identifying appropriate measures of task complexity/difficulty
• building software tools to automate estimation of task complexity/difficulty
• developing guidelines for designing equivalent assessment options for introductory programming
• building equivalent assessment tasks with different theming for introductory programming
• evaluating task difficulty by comparing estimates with complexity of real student work

Your contributions have the potential to have real impact. Our goal is to integrate this work into FIT1045 Introduction to Programming, which is completed by thousands of students each year. We also hope to engage with you as a person, and to help you develop in the areas you are wanting to focus on.