2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

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.