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Improving Engineering Education through Creativity, Collaboration, and Context In a First Year Course

Abstract Over the past few years, Computer Science and some Engineering disciplines have suffered from a decrease in student enrollment, poor retention, and low women and minority representation. We suggest three issues with first-year courses that contribute to this trend. First, students find it difficult to see how their assignments and course material relate to real-world applications. Second, students tend to perceive engineering as an individual endeavor requiring little interaction with peers. Last, early engineering assignments are often overly constrained, possibly to ease grading, allowing minimal room for student creativity. In this paper, we present a model for an introductory freshman-level course that helps address student enrollment and retention issues. Our course is based on three tenets: (1) the course draws problems from, and teaches about, an interesting and relevant domain in which students already are familiar, (2) the course encourages teamwork and peer communication, (3) the student is actively responsible for their education. To address these, the class teaches game design in a collaborative environment in which students are given open-ended assignments to promote creativity. We address instructor grading concerns, various student skill levels, and individual assessment. In our approach, we encourage the implicit acquisition of basic computer science concepts and skills as opposed to directly lecturing about them. Over 60% of the students in our class had no prior programming experience, yet all of the student teams were successful in developing engaging Flash-based games. Student surveys revealed that nearly all students characterize computer science as collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and creative. We believe our class can serve as a model to create other discipline-specific introductory courses. 1.0 Introduction Project-Based Learning (PBL) has been shown to improve student retention, increase long-term interest, and improve performance in future design courses.2, 6, 9, 12 Capstone and cornerstone3 courses are a common home for PBL in many universities. Capstone courses are well-known and cornerstone courses are their freshman-level equivalent. Studies show that cornerstone courses have an even greater impact on the retention of women and minorities6, 17 – in some cases, retention rates improved up to 27% and 56%, respectively.2 The growth of capstone and cornerstone courses may be the result of a 1997 National Science Foundation report5 that calls for engineering educational reform and ABET criteria that emphasize design, teamwork, and communication. Unfortunately, one of the major roadblocks to cornerstone courses is faculty involvement. Faculty members are generally resistant to the amount of effort required to organize and maintain a successful PBL course.11 Cornerstone courses involve creating an interesting problem, possibly in an unfamiliar field, working and managing student teams, and assessing individual and team contributions while accommodating the skill level of incoming freshmen. This extra work does not sound particularly appealing given the pressure on faculty to publish and the lack of staff to

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Haungs, M., & Clements, J., & Janzen, D. (2008, June), Improving Engineering Education Through Creativity, Collaboration, And Context In A First Year Course Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3316