Active learning in small to large courses

This paper presents the authors' experiences promoting active learning in programming courses from introductory to advanced levels. They use a variety of techniques as their courses vary greatly in size and their facilities vary in layout and equipment. For large lectures, they present active interludes that require students to work in small groups, respond to periodic polls, or help a professor program. For moderately sized courses, they ask students to work in groups and share their observations with the class. Finally, in their interactive computer classroom they have almost completely departed from long lectures to run the course in a workshop format, giving students a chance to work on the computer almost everyday in a supervised, safe environment. In short, although these techniques often require longer preparation time, they show that active learning can be done in any classroom situation and students must be active everyday to remain engaged in the material.