Tracking an innovation in introductory CS education from a research university to a two-year college

ABSTRACT

Innovations in teaching and learning computer science education can easily be overly-specific to a given institution, or type of institution. For example, an innovation may require special hardware, or may make assumptions about the background of the students. This paper tracks one such innovation, a multimedia-focused introductory computing course, as it moved from a research-focused university to a public two-year college. At both institutions, the new course resulted in dramatically improved retention. Students at the two-year college were even more motivated and more positive about computing after the course than students at the research university. The results suggest ways of approaching innovation that is easily adaptable to other institutions.

REFERENCES

• 1: AAUW. Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age. American Association of University Women Education Foundation, New York, 2000.
• 2: Andrea Forte , Mark Guzdial, Computers for Communication, Not Calculation: Media as a Motivation and Context for Learning, Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 4, p.40096.1, January 05-08, 2004
• 3: Mark Guzdial , Andrea Forte, Design process for a non-majors computing course, Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, February 23-27, 2005, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
CS1, adoption/adaptation, multimedia, programming