SELF: Student Lab Framework for Improving Engagement and Learning

Teaching Java programming to undergraduate students is a challenge as they have widely different prior programming experience. New learners find it difficult to cope with programming concepts, syntax, and implementation. To ease the learning process and to motivate the students to learn programming concepts, we let junior undergraduate students independently define the lab exercises, course project, and choose coding tool of their choice. To engage the experienced learners' and improve the new learners' confidence for implementing Java concepts, we also used peer learning along with this technique. Experienced programmers and new learners worked together in a group to deliver a project at the end of the semester. Our results show that students (81%) are able to define reasonably well lab work and projects, and execute them well, when they are involved in defining the learning tasks. 89% of the students found that this approach was effective in motivating them to learn the programming course.