Introductory Engineering Decision-Making: Guiding First-Year Students to Relativism in Software Design

Contribution: A semester-long, open-ended design project was implemented to promote intellectual development of first-year students while reinforcing event-driven/procedural programming principles. This paper describes this approach, and an evaluation strategy using Perry's model for intellectual development. The results show that students can reach the relativism stage of Perry's model in their first year of studies. Background: Students must move beyond a dualistic worldview to be engineers. Felder and Brent provided a list of recommendations to promote this type of intellectual development in students; active learning strategies strongly align with these recommendations. While active learning is common in programming courses (sometimes taking the form of project-based learning), they are typically tightly controlled by the instructor, and limited in scope (both in time and complexity), potentially reducing their impact on students. Intended Outcomes: This course and term-long project provided students a supportive environment in which to develop their decision-making skills, and promoted their intellectual development through Perry's stages related to software design. Application Design: Aligned with Felder and Brent's recommendations and Kuh's High Impact Practices, a course was built to: 1) teach students procedural programming, with 2) a focus on software design and open-ended problem solving, while maintaining 3) a supportive environment for skill acquisition. Findings: A mixed methods study showed the majority of students align themselves with the relativism stage of intellectual development at the end of the course. This study also illuminated the decision-making processes of teams of students in a first-year software design course.