Work In Progress: From Scratch - The Design of a First-Year Engineering Programming Course

This work in progress study concerns the design and implementation of a first-year programming course for engineering students at a large public university in the Mid-Atlantic United States. Mid-Atlantic University (MAU) accepts approximately 800 first-year engineering students annually, and has an enrollment of approximately 1200 students in its fall and spring Introductory Programming Class (IPC), taught in MATLAB. The IPC is currently under redesign through the process of Backward Design[1]. The research around this redesign attempts to answer the following question: How can the implementation of non-traditional pedagogy be used to increase self-efficacy, motivation, learning and retention in an introductory programming class? This redesign is being implemented in three phases. The first phase, which has been completed, emphasized the development of course outcomes and the implementation of active learning activities in lectures. The second phase, which is still ongoing, is emphasizing the implementation of supplemental online resources, a non-traditional digital textbook format, and the addition of a project to the course to give students more autonomy over their learning. The final phase, which has yet to come, will be a trial division of the class into two courses, one for students with prior programming experience, and one for students who are new to programming. This paper primarily discusses the implementation of and results from the first phase. Preliminary results show that students in Phase 1 withdrew from the course at a lower rate than in previous semesters. However, the continuing gap in motivation and self-efficacy between students who have programmed before and students who have not in both motivation and self-efficacy suggests that additional redesign is still needed.