Flipping the Foundation: A Multi-Year Flipped Classroom Study for a Large-Scale Introductory Programming Course

The flipped classroom format is becoming increasingly accepted among many engineering schools. By offering traditional lecture material online or outside of the scheduled class time, students are able to spend their interaction time with the instructor on hands-on homework and application activities. Like many undergraduate engineering programs, at the Schulich School of Engineering all first year students are required to take the introductory computer programming course. With course enrollment around 800 students, and the relatively wide variety of students with different programming backgrounds, it would be challenging to provide the students with an in-depth learning experience by relying only on a traditional lecture hall format. A flipped classroom provides students with the opportunity to explore the implementation of theoretical programming concepts previously learned online. After a significant redesign, this course has been run in a flipped classroom format since summer of 2015. Weekly video lecture content is provided through an online learning management system, and students are held accountable through embedded quizzes. Students collaborate on interactive studio exercises both inside and outside of class time, culminating in a final creative design project. Data regarding student performance, assessment, and perceptions has been collected over several semesters and will be analyzed and presented in the final paper. Both quantitative and qualitative measures will be included in a mixed methods study. Student performance in consecutive courses will also be discussed in comparison to previous non-flipped cohorts. This paper will outline the design and implementation over two years for this large-scale flipped introductory programming course, and will provide recommendations to other educators based on experience and lessons learned.