Abstract:

It is important to get students motivated and interested in the subject they are studying at the beginning of their studies. Getting them past the first courses with good basic understanding of the major topics in their field provides them with a fruitful foundation for success in the rest of their education. To reach these somewhat high goals, we redesigned our two introductory courses to computer science. The courses Introduction to Computer Science I and II provide students with a basic understanding of algorithms, programming, and hardware of the computer when a program is being executed on the machine. At the heart of our redesign is the tutorial-based learning approach we have successfully used on other courses. The courses revolve around weekly topics, each of which is covered by a teacher-lead lecture, student-focused tutorial worked out in small student groups or pairs, as well as individual exercises. Moreover, we discuss the technological solutions behind the automated assessment systems used on the courses in order to make the teacher workload manageable. The same environment was used to collect weekly feedback from students on the lecture, tutorial and given exercises. In this paper, we analyze the responses given by the students regarding the renewed approach as well as describe the online environment used on the courses and the contents of the redesigned courses.

Keywords:

Automatic assessment, Tutorial-based learning, Course redesign.