Making university education more like middle school computer club: facilitating the flow of inspiration

Authors:
Alexander Repenning;Ashok Basawapatna;Kyu Han Koh
Affiliations:
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO;University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO;University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO
Venue:
Proceedings of the 14th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education
Year:
2009

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Abstract

The way programming is currently taught at the University level provides little incentive and tends to discourage student peer-to-peer interaction. These practices effectively stifle any notion of a 'learning community' developing among students enrolled in university level programming classes. This approach to programming education stands in stark contrast to the 'middle school computer club' approach; As part of 10 years of research projects aiming to teach programming to middle school children, it is observed that middle school students in computer clubs freely share programming ideas, code, and often query one another and provide solutions to the various programming problems encountered. To enable these interactions at the university level, a novel online infrastructure has been developed over the past 6 years through use in the Educational Game Design Class at the University of Colorado Boulder. The culmination of the submission system, entitled the Scalable Game Design Arcade (SGDA), seems to foster the flow of ideas among students yielding an effective open classroom approach to programming education.