Full Paper - Building on the First-Year Engineering programming experience: Understanding the motivation and self-efficacy of students in a follow-on programming course

Joseph A Lyon; Mayari I. Serrano

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Conference: 15th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience Conference (FYEE)
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Publication Date: July 28, 2024
Start Date: July 28, 2024
End Date: July 30, 2024
Page Count: 9
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--48590
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48590
Download Count: 86

Paper Authors

biography

Joseph A Lyon University of Notre Dame orcid.org/0000-0002-1993-4191

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Joseph A. Lyon is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Education. His research interests are computational thinking and mathematical modeling.

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biography

Mayari I. Serrano Purdue University at West Lafayette (PPI) orcid.org/0000-0003-1033-6459

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Mayari Serrano Anazco is a visiting clinical assistant professor in the Honors College at Purdue University. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology Engineering at Ecuador's Army Polytechnic School and her Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Technology from Purdue University. In 2018, she and Dr. Suzanne Zurn-Birkhimer and Dr. Beth M. Holloway were conferred the Susan Bulkeley Butler Research Fellowship Award. After obtaining her Ph.D., she was appointed as the first post-doctoral fellow of the Women in Engineering Program at Purdue University.
Mayari Serrano has worked towards increasing women's participation in technology and engineering for over eight years previous coming to the John Martinson Honors College. She has authored, co-authored, implemented, and assessed learning activities, outreach activities, and workshops focused on modifying negative attitudes towards technology and engineering and increasing knowledge of several topics of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
Mayari Serrano's research focuses on commercial and educational technologies' effect on teaching, learning, diversity, and inclusion. Her publications show interdisciplinary interest and cover multimodal learning environments, embodied cognition, complex concepts, user experience, spatial abilities, gender bias, gender stereotypes, e-mentoring, sense of belonging, campus climate, and exergaming.

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Abstract

This full paper overviews the educational design of a follow-on programming course designed for students exiting their first-year engineering sequence of courses. As computation and computational thinking are becoming critical skills for engineers of all disciplines, the aim of engineering educators should be to build on programming skills students are learning early in their engineering undergraduate curriculum. However, currently, there may be some problems with the approach that many undergraduate institutions are taking to teaching programming skills. Programming is often left in the abstract, doesn’t get reinforced, and can feel isolating for students. The goal of this course design is to contextualize programming in new and unique ways for students to better understand its application and use using a community-based approach that would engage and motivate.

The course teaches students concepts around numerical computation that are key to engineering problem solving such as simple numerical techniques for integration to complex methods such as finite element analysis. The course leverages principles from a communities of practice perspective to (1) help motivate and engage students to learn to program and practice computational thinking and (2) illuminate the importance of programming to various fields across engineering. Data was collected in the form of a validated survey based on the motivation literature, as well as a self-efficacy survey around computer programming. The results of the study are twofold: (1) an overview of how the curriculum was structured and implemented within this setting to be adapted and used in new and other contexts and (2) the survey results that indicate that follow-on courses can be a valuable tool in contributing to student motivation and self-efficacy in learning computer programming and computational thinking. The paper concludes by giving recommendations for teaching and learning in first-year engineering classes based on the results.

Citation
Format

Lyon, J. A., & Serrano, M. I. (2024, July), Full Paper - Building on the First-Year Engineering programming experience: Understanding the motivation and self-efficacy of students in a follow-on programming course Paper presented at 15th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience Conference (FYEE), Boston, Massachusetts. 10.18260/1-2--48590