. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2017Work In Progress: The Design of a First-Year Engineering Programming CourseAbstractThis work in progress study concerns the design and implementation of a first-year programming coursefor engineering students at a large public university in the Mid-Atlantic United States. Mid-AtlanticUniversity (MAU) accepts approximately 800 first-year engineering students annually, and has anenrollment 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 theimplementation of non-traditional
, otheruniversities can adopt and adapt these activities to use in their programs.1. IntroductionChoosing a major is a daunting task for many first-year college students, especially if the choicesspan fields with which students have little exposure and experience. It is estimated that 20 – 50%of first-year college students enter college as “undecided” about their major[7]. In order toprovide first-year engineering students time to discern, a set of resources and course activitieswere created and assessed in an introduction to engineering course. The results of two studies arepresented in this paper.The structure of the remainder of the paper is as follows. The next section describes theeducational theory relevant to this study, models of introduction to