ABC: Application Based Collaborative Approach to Improve Student Engagement for a Programming Course

Teaching programming to first year 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 logic building process. To ease the learning process and to motivate the students to learn programming concepts, we introduced students to a visual block-building tool (code.org) and an interactive programming application tool (Solo Learn C++). To improve the students' confidence for creating programs, we also used a collaborative project based learning technique. Experienced programmers and new learners worked together in a group to deliver a project at end of the semester. Our results show that students (86%) found this approach helpful to learn the concepts, revise, practice, and improve their confidence for implementing programming concepts.