Evolving a Programming CS2 Course: A Decade-Long Experience Report

Despite instructors' best efforts in designing and delivering any given course, changes are likely required from time to time. This experience report presents the changes made in a second-year programming course for non-computing engineering majors over a decade's worth of effort, and the reasons behind those changes. The changes were often reactive - in response to student feedback. However, many other changes were inspired by the desire to trial new interventions in the hope of strengthening the students' positive experience. In addition to personnel and course content changes, the gradual evolvement included how labs, assignments, and activities were structured and executed. Teaching delivery evolved, along with a number of small-scale interventions that eventually became integral elements of the course. When COVID-19 demanded a sudden shift to online learning, the course was prepared to adapt quickly and successfully. The contributions here come in the form of lessons learned over the past decade: what worked, and what did not. We present the large range of changes - -and their rationales - that are particularly relevant and applicable to programming courses targeting engineering students where the luxury of pedagogically-friendlier programming languages is not possible. © 2023 ACM.

Blended to Remote Learning : Preservice Teacher Experiences of a Redesigned Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Course

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic presented many higher education institutions with a sudden challenge to shift from either face-to-face and/or blended instruction to remote teaching in order to save the academic year. This article examines preservice teachers’ experiences of a redesigned blended-learning year course on work-integrated learning (WIL). The article uses the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework within a blended-learning environment to examine the responses of 414 preservice teachers in their first year of study to a survey completed at the end of the course. Descriptive statistics were used together with course content analysis to generate the findings, which suggested that the majority (above 80%) of the preservice teachers remained active during the shift to remote teaching, and about 93.3% responded positively to the course redesign by actively accessing the course on the online platform at least once a week. The survey results also showed that only 10.4% of the preservice teachers did not experience one or another form of challenge in learning through remote teaching during this time. The results build a case for how other practitioners and instructional designers could redesign courses with the consideration of context and learning challenges. The article concludes with the argument for the design of blended courses for future needs to focus more closely on each aspect of the mode of delivery so as to ensure effective design that can withstand emergency situations, such as those we have seen during COVID-19.

A blended learning framework for delivary of Laboratory Course in Digital Circuits during COVID-19 pandemic

The paper proposes a framework to demonstrate the effectiveness through blended learning in Digital Circuits Course by redesigning the content delivery and mode of hands-on experimentation. The present situation of pandemic has created scope for experimenting with various modes of course redesign and delivery for effective teaching/learning of the courses. A Digital Circuit course in third semester of Engineering discipline is redesigned w.r.t. video lectures, course content, number of experiments, mode of learning, mode of teaching, simulations, hands on experimentation and evaluation rubrics. A webpage was designed for students comprising of all the information needed to conduct the laboratory efficiently. The video lectures were prepared by the course instructors on the concepts and design aspects of all the experiments. The designed experiments were simulated and shown to the students for its appropriateness. The designed circuits were hard wired on the breadboard and the results were demonstrated through the recorded videos of the same. Lab was conducted in marathon from morning to evening with more focus on detailed resources shared and learnt by students before conduction in lab without compromising learning in hardware related labs. All these details helped the students to gather extra knowledge for effective implementation of designed circuits. The effectiveness of learning was measured through designed rubrics and graded accordingly. The students were exposed to another way of efficient learning i.e., blended mode. © 2021 IEEE.

Work in Progress: Remote Instruction of Circuitry in a Multidisciplinary Introduction to Engineering First-year Course

This paper is focused on a course redesign transitioning from a hardware-based course into a course taught remotely. The J. B. Speed School of Engineering (SSoE) at the University of Louisville (UofL) has a two-course sequence that all first-year SSoE students are required to complete. This two-course sequence is designed to introduce incoming students to the profession and fundamentals of engineering. The first course is titled Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice I (ENGR 110), and primarily focuses on introduction to and practice with fundamental engineering skills. The second course, Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice II (ENGR 111) is typically a makerspace-based course primarily focused on application and integration of the fundamentals learned in ENGR 110. Included amongst numerous skills institutionally identified as “fundamental” were programming and basic circuitry. Therefore, all disciplines of SSoE engineering students are exposed to the basics of circuitry and programming through ENGR 111 pedagogy. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this makerspace course is to be taught remotely in the spring semester of 2021. The instructional team felt that there were too many shared tools and teams were too close together to safely continue the course in a makerspace environment. This remote teaching has posed the instructional team some unique challenges due to the hands-on nature of the ENGR 111 course. Students are typically in face-to-face teams of 3 or 4 students and each group is given an Arduino, breadboard, and circuit components. The given assignments start out with basic circuity and Arduino programming, followed by utilizing an Arduino to communicate with created circuits. The assignments are designed to help the first-year students gain comfort in circuitry and programming. The instructional team has decided to use Tinkercad, which is a free online collection of software tools provided by Autodesk. Many people are only aware of Tinkercad as a 3D modeling programming, however in 2017 Autodesk merged its “123D Circuits” into Tinkercad [1] [2]. This makes Tinkercad an ideal platform to use for circuitry and Arduino programming. The paper will further describe the design of the assignments, instructional team expectations from the students, the environment in which the students are using Tinkercad, as well as looking at expected course outcomes using the platform. This topic is a work in progress as data for evidence-based analyses will not be fully procured until after publication. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021