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A Crash Course for Preparing Students for a First Course in Computing: Did it Work?
Author(s) -
Christensen Ken,
Rundus Dewey,
Fujinoki Hiroshi,
Davis Darrel
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of engineering education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.896
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 2168-9830
pISSN - 1069-4730
DOI - 10.1002/j.2168-9830.2002.tb00725.x
Subject(s) - boot camp , course (navigation) , crash , observational study , work (physics) , medical education , mathematics education , psychology , sampling (signal processing) , computer science , engineering , medicine , mathematics , operating system , library science , statistics , mechanical engineering , filter (signal processing) , computer vision , aerospace engineering
To improve the performance of students in a required core course in computing, we added a voluntary “boot camp” crash course in the first week of the semester. The boot camp students did remarkably better in the course. Using collected data from two semesters (252 students of which 73 voluntarily enrolled in boot camp), we used observational study with matched sampling to evaluate the effectiveness of the boot camp. We were able to show, with a high degree of confidence, that the boot camp had a direct benefit on freshman and sophomore students and/or students with a higher than average external load.