Fostering Engagement and Creativity through Programming: The Beauty and Joy of Computing in a First-year Engineering class

There is a growing interest in learning computer programming even among students from majors other than computer science (CS). Many universities offer a common Introduction to Programming (CS1) course, but this approach is usually detrimental to those who are not pursuing a CS major. This article is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	2020 39th International Conference of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) pp. 1 - 5
Main Authors:	Meza, Federico, Torres, Nicolas, Vasquez, Andrea
Format:	Conference Proceeding
Language:	English
Published:	IEEE 16.11.2020
Subjects:	BJC block-based programming Computer science education CS0 introduction to programming Snap
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	There is a growing interest in learning computer programming even among students from majors other than computer science (CS). Many universities offer a common Introduction to Programming (CS1) course, but this approach is usually detrimental to those who are not pursuing a CS major. This article is an experience report that summarizes the results of adapting and implementing the course "The Beauty and Joy of Computing" (BJC) in an Engineering in Product Design first-year class, a group that showed below-average performance in the past. BJC is a course for undergraduate non-CS majors at UC Berkeley, designed to broaden student participation in Computer Science. After a fully online semester of BJC at UTFSM, students showed greater responsibility and commitment when compared to previous cohorts. They also reported greater satisfaction with programming while having a lower attrition rate and comparable final grades to students in the regular CS1 class.
DOI:	10.1109/SCCC51225.2020.9281159