2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Despite growing demands for software development skills in the professional job market, companies are finding that students lack the necessary programming and soft skills they deem necessary directly out of college. Given this, we propose a novel educational approach using live streaming as a means of giving students the opportunity to gain practical experience and knowledge about subjects that interest them and their subsequent professional interests.

In this work, we describe our experiences creating and running an undergraduate computer science course where students live stream software and game development projects of their choosing weekly over the course of the semester. The course was conducted over two semesters: an initial pilot, followed by a refined iteration incorporating lessons learned and student-provided feedback. In both iterations of this course, students live stream for a set amount of hours each week while maintaining a diary of their accomplishments and how they felt their individual streams went. We evaluate the students on their perceived self-efficacy and the evolving perceptions of their goals and desired achievements during this course through three reflection assignments.

Our observations reveal that students initially took the course to set aside time to work on personal projects and develop their programming skills, with motivations changing throughout the semester and often scaling back from original larger-scope projects and goals. Following the pilot semester, we analyzed student recommendations and reflected on the course structure and outcomes. This reflection informed targeted interventions and improvements implemented in the subsequent semester. We present an analysis of both course iterations and highlight the impacts of these interventions on student experiences and learning outcomes. Additionally, we analyze and discuss students' perceived self-efficacy in programming and live streaming skills.

We conclude by discussing lessons learned from this two-phase implementation and proposing future research directions in educational live streaming for computer science students. Our iterative approach demonstrates the potential for continuous improvement in innovative educational methodologies.