Code for Thought: Teaching Computer Programming Courses in a Post-COVID World

Many students chose remote learning during COVID.While most students have returned to campus in person in Fall 2021, dynamic pandemic conditions call for educational methodology that is highly effective in engaging students in learning.In this paper, we report our experience of "Code for Thought", a practice that we developed for programming-heavy courses in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut.The main idea behind "Code for Thought" is to break down the learning into small steps, gradually easing students into solving more difficult problems by reinforcing the concepts, and building up their skills as well as confidence.Specifically, it includes small programming assignments given to students immediately after a class (e.g., we gave 31 "Code for Thought" assignments in a Data Structure course in two semesters).Each assignment is tied with the content just covered in class, with only one or two lines of code for students to fill in to complete the task, and is designed to be interesting (e.g., based on intriguing games, puzzles or math problems) to engage students.These small "bite-size" exercises provide students opportunities to immediately practice what they learned in a class and build on coding examples written by the instructors.We use data collected from several offerings enhanced with this practice to demonstrate its effectiveness in stimulating students' learning and helping them to gain confidence.We believe it can be particularly effective in teaching programming courses in post-COVID engineering education.