Engineering Student Perspectives of a New Required Programming Course

In this research to practice report, we present student perceptions of a new first-year engineering programming class that was designed by informed research practices. While the College of Engineering at the participating university saw a lot of major switching in the first year, there were not many students switching into computer science (CS). This could have been because other engineering major classes did not transfer well to CS or that students would be a year behind in the programming classes. In either case, the participating university felt that computational thinking and programming were an important part of first-year engineering exploration and believed that all 21st century engineering majors should learn to program in a general purpose language, such as Python or C++. Past research found that prior programming experience, knowledge organization, self-efficacy, and class size were factors impacting student performance in early programming courses, and learning about programming enhanced students' problem-solving skills and improved perceptions about CS. Many other research studies showed that the context in which programming material was presented to non-majors was important for their learning and interest, and themed, mixed-context courses with real-world engineering problems worked well. Therefore, in the spring 2022, we created 12, 100-person sections of a course titled “Engineering Computational and Algorithmic Thinking” for a new first-year engineering experience. Each section was taught by a different instructor representing a variety of disciplines and topics in the College of Engineering. This paper describes the research to practice and engineering student perceptions of the new, required programming class. We hypothesized that engineering students would say that the course should be required for all engineering majors, but we wanted to know why. We believed that student prior programming experience, engineering major, and other demographics would play a role in their responses. We thematically analyzed student justifications to identify emerging themes, and we used a mixed-method approach to correlate themes to different student demographics, engineering major interest, and prior programming experience. The majority of engineering students agreed that the first-year engineering course should be required, and prior programming experience and major played the largest role.