Examining Software Design Projects in a First-Year Engineering Course: How Assigning an Open-Ended Game Project Impacts Student Experience

Courses that teach programming often include large software design projects intended to synthesize the elements learned in the class. A software design project has been used at a large public university in the first-year engineering honors course to practice using programming elements and prepare students for the second semester course. Prior to Autumn 2014 all sections of the course created a program to detect and compute the frequency of an infrared (IR) signal. In Autumn 2015, six sections of the course changed the design project to be designing and programming a game, four sections assigned the traditional IR project, and two sections gave students the choice. Based on survey results, students who completed the game project indicated greater enjoyment, greater sense of creativity, greater teamwork skill development, greater preparation to their future as an engineering, and preparation for the spring semester project compared to those who completed the IR project.