Work in Progress - Collaboration Pedagogy in the Introductory Computer Science Programming Course for Engineers

First-Year Engineering students at Purdue University most frequently select CS 158, a C Programming course, to satisfy their computer programming requirement. During the Spring 2005 semester 915 students elected CS 158 and a major effort was made to introduce collaborative teaming on course assignments including projects and in weekly laboratories. It is believed that such collaboration represents how professional engineers function and is a friendlier environment to women who already face a number of barriers in an introductory computer programming course. Our exploratory research is to identify barriers, recommended by Scragg and Smith, present in CS 158 after the implementation of collaborative teaming.