Baltimore , Maryland
June 25, 2023
June 25, 2023
June 28, 2023
Software Engineering Division (SWED)
10
10.18260/1-2--44165
https://peer.asee.org/44165
196
Stephanos (Steve) Matsumoto is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Olin College of Engineering. His research interests are in computing education, particularly in how to incorporate better software engineering practices when teaching computing in undergraduate STEM courses.
In this paper, we conduct a qualitative study to describe how focusing more on software engineering skills, code quality, and reflection on programming practices in an introductory computing course has led to improvements in students’ experience and learning outcomes. Our work took place during the summer and fall of 2020 at Olin College of Engineering, a small, undergraduate-only engineering college in Massachusetts. We describe how, motivated by difficulties in developing and assessing code quality in students work, we significantly redesigned course materials, assessment rubrics, and tooling. While we and our colleagues see informal evidence that the overall quality of student work and coding habits have improved, we conducted semi-structured interviews with current students and alumni, representing the perspectives of those who took the old version of the course and those who took the redesigned version. We present early results from these interviews, identifying themes that represent student perceptions on how computing courses are useful in their education and in their careers. These themes will help us to develop further metrics that will allow us to assess the usefulness of the course redesign in a more detailed way. In turn, these metrics will help us analyze future redesigns, both to this course and to other courses in our computing curriculum.
Matsumoto, S. (2023, June), Work in Progress: An Interview-Based Retrospective on the Redesign of an Introductory Computing Course Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--44165
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