Asee peer logo

Examining Software Design Projects in a First-Year Engineering Course: How Assigning an Open-Ended Game Project Impacts Student Experience

Download Paper |

Conference

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Columbus, Ohio

Publication Date

June 24, 2017

Start Date

June 24, 2017

End Date

June 28, 2017

Conference Session

First Year Computing Topics

Tagged Division

Computers in Education

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--28316

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/28316

Download Count

585

Paper Authors

biography

Krista M Kecskemety Ohio State University

visit author page

Krista Kecskemety is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. Krista received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University in 2006 and received her M.S. from Ohio State in 2007. In 2012, Krista completed her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State. Her engineering education research interests include investigating first-year engineering student experiences, faculty experiences, and the connection between the two.

visit author page

biography

Allen Benjamin Drown Ohio State University

visit author page

Allen is a third year Industrial and Systems Engineering Undergraduate student at The Ohio State University who is an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for the Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors (FEH) Program. His interests include Engineering Education, Lean Manufacturing, and Humanitarian Engineering. He will graduate with his B.S.I.S.E in May, 2018.

visit author page

biography

Lauren Corrigan Ohio State University

visit author page

Lauren Corrigan is a lecturer in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Ohio State. She has two years of industry experience as an environmental engineering consultant. Her responsibilities included solid waste design, construction quality assurance, and computer aided design in support of various environmental projects. Lauren currently engages in teaching and curriculum development within the First-Year Engineering Program. Her research interests include the retention and success of students in STEM fields, with a particular focus on under-represented populations.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

Courses that teach programming often include large software design projects intended to synthesize the elements learned in the class. A software design project has been used at a large public university in the first-year engineering honors course to practice using programming elements and prepare students for the second semester course. Prior to Autumn 2014 all sections of the course created a program to detect and compute the frequency of an infrared (IR) signal. In Autumn 2015, six sections of the course changed the design project to be designing and programming a game, four sections assigned the traditional IR project, and two sections gave students the choice. Based on survey results, students who completed the game project indicated greater enjoyment, greater sense of creativity, greater teamwork skill development, greater preparation to their future as an engineering, and preparation for the spring semester project compared to those who completed the IR project.

Kecskemety, K. M., & Drown, A. B., & Corrigan, L. (2017, June), Examining Software Design Projects in a First-Year Engineering Course: How Assigning an Open-Ended Game Project Impacts Student Experience Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--28316

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2017 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015