Traditional Lecture Format vs. Active Teaching Format in an Online Freshman Engineering Course

Abstract

This complete paper analyzes the impact of active classroom learning on student performance in an introductory computing course. This course is a freshman level, foundational course in the Computer Engineering track in our engineering program. Student performance and overall experience in this course can influence their perception of the major, and therefore affect retention rates. A significant number of our freshman students enter our program with some computer programming experience through high school level courses in Java programming. Evidence gathered through a survey conducted at the start of the semester indicated that more than 50% of our incoming students have either completed AP Computer Science A or AP Computer Science Principles or both, about 25% have taken another computer programming course or learned programming through high school club activities, and only about 20% of our students have no experience whatsoever. While this freshman level course does not require any prior knowledge of programming basics, students having some background are at an advantage due to their familiarity with the process of algorithmic thinking, and translation of an algorithm to a computer program. The primary objective of this research project was to determine the impact of active learning on students with different levels of programming experience, and to test whether this teaching style would help level the playing field.