First Programming Course In Engineering: Balancing Tradition And Application

The “Introduction to Programming” course is an essential part of any first-year engineering program. As part of a common first-year curriculum, one of the biggest challenges of this first programming course is to both teach fundamental programming concepts and give students practical tools that can be applied easily to upper level courses in different engineering disciplines. At Cornell University, we offer a new first-year programming course that uses two very different programming languages: MATLAB and Java. This one-semester course balances the need for working knowledge of a fundamental programming language, such as Java, and the need for working knowledge of an engineering computing tool so that upper-level courses can focus on high-level, conceptual issues rather than programming details. Furthermore, this new course accommodates students in arts and sciences who are interested in a programming course that has a strong mathematical focus instead of a more traditional programming course offered in a computer science department. This paper discusses the challenges in developing the course, the ambitious one-semester syllabus that teaches both MATLAB and Java with depth, our evaluation of this new course, and our plans for improving the programming course in a common first-year engineering curriculum.