Assessment of Student Attitudes and its Impact in a Hands-On Programming Model for the Introductory Programming Course

Many students enter engineering programs as a result of a hands-on experiences that they have had directly or indirectly in their past.The freshman-level programming course provides an ideal opportunity to build students' perceptions of engineering, creativity, and notions of how things work.Ideally, students will begin learning programming in an environment that matches their notions of engineering, that engineers design systems to control the world around them, and then later move to solving advanced models that describe how the world works.A recent model has been implemented in the college of engineering at Tennessee Tech (TTU) to base the initial programming experience on hardware in the loop approach where the programming target is a micro-controller.This course has been offered in both C/C++ and Matlab programming language.From multiple previous implementations, we see that the students that engaged in the hands-on, hardware-based programming activities reported a more positive early experience with programming and its relation to the engineering curriculum relative to their comparison-group peers.The students participating in the project also reported improved confidence in their ability to learn and use programming and note its importance in their engineering studies.However, we have observed in both the treatment and control group that the students' change in attitude toward programming in some cases is neutral or negative.This result was not expected and did not correlate directly with the degree of engagement with the model.This paper will explore these findings in greater detail.It will provide an overview of the model and the expected outcomes in student attitudes towards programming.It will present the findings in student attitude resulting from three semesters-worth of project implementation.Several potential factors that led to these results will be presented.The paper will conclude with the implications of these findings on planning assessment tools for entry-level programming experiences based on student attitudes.