Encouraging student innovation in a freshman-level computer science course

Abstract

In a world where the demand is high for employees who can think creatively and apply entrepreneurial behaviors and thought processes to their work, it is critically important for engineering and computer science programs to provide more educational opportunities that take the essential basics of the disciplines and add to that content the experiences that will also encourage the development of entrepreneurial behaviors in students development of solutions to the challenges they face. In a second-semester project-based learning course in computer science at Baylor University, the students were introduced to an idea-generation technique called Painstorming chosen to encourage opportunity recognition, and asked to develop their own idea for a semester project. This paper will cover the success of project-based learning in engineering and computer science courses, show a method of idea generation called Painstorming, the application of Painstorming to software applications as a means to generate group project ideas, the adjustments necessary for the successful implementation of this approach in an already busy course, and the preliminary results of the experiment.