2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Commuter students face unique challenges in integrating into college learning communities. Engaging with first-year commuter students became incredibly challenging after the pandemic forced learning communities to transform into virtual or hybrid environments. To address this challenge, we developed a linked-courses approach to engage first-year commuter students in our departmental learning community. We linked two introductory courses, Computer Science I (CS I) and Computing Foundation, with joint-curricular and extra-curricular activities offered by upper-class students from student clubs and a departmental service-learning program. Informed by the situated-learning theory, our approach creates the context for the first-year students, the novice, to interact with the more experienced upper-class students and develop their sense of community and belonging.

After analyzing the syllabi and schedules of both classes, we conducted the following activities during Spring 2023.
• A joint seminar, AI & Dance. Upper-class students presented to the students in the linked courses how AI was applied to dancing. They also facilitated first-year students experimenting with software, generating visual effects based on their body movements detected through cameras.

• A joint seminar on women’s role in cryptography history, hosted by the Department’s ACM-Women clubs and presented remotely by the National Cryptologic Museum.

• Two separate robotics workshops. The Department’s service-learning program students presented how to program robots to follow the torchlight of a cellphone with loops and branches.

To offer the joint events, we leveraged the overlapping class time between CS I and Foundations of Computing and the time immediately after CS I. The CS I students were incentivized with extra credits to stay after their lab until the end of the seminars.

We collected qualitative data to evaluate our approach because it provides in-depth insight into the problem, i.e., the student needs we are trying to address. Group interviews were conducted at the end of Spring 2023. A total of fifteen students from the two linked courses participated. The qualitative data helped us understand the minority students’ experiences and explore their perspectives.

Our end-of-semester interviews showed that the linked activities increased the students’ understanding of computing and established meaningful relationships with upper-class students. Some of the students joined student organizations or became volunteer presenters. One student commented on our approach: “It provides a bigger network for us, gives you an opportunity to interact with those students …you interact with people you’d probably wouldn’t interact with…., you can add them on LinkedIn, or you see them on campus, you can talk to them, and, …, get help from them.”

We also discovered that students would like to have more of the following:
1) Project-based learning experiences.
2) Group activities.
3) Hands-on experiences.

Our preliminary data shows that our linked-courses approach effectively engages first-year computing students. Other commuter schools or schools with commuter students can adopt this innovative, low-cost approach to engage students and increase retention. We plan to continue this study in the next few semesters to collect more data and explore how it works with different courses.