Games, stories, or something more traditional: the types of assignments college students prefer

  • Authors:

  • Daniel C. Cliburn;Susan Miller

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA, USA;Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In this paper, we describe a study designed to examine the types of projects college students prefer in an introductory programming course. For three assignments in a course, students were given a choice among three project types: a game, a "choose your own adventure" story, and a more traditional project (such as a problem from the text book). During the semester, 35 of 49 projects submitted by students were the game option (71.4%), with only two projects submitted that were stories. A statistical analysis revealed that student choices on assignments did not appear to be related to their overall performance in the course. On an end of term survey, students commented that they often chose projects that had all requirements clearly explained, and avoided assignments that were open-ended in nature.