Development of Parallel Stretch Programming Courses to Improve Outcomes for Students with Minimal Prior Computing Experience

Engineering students, regardless of major, need to learn how to program. Most engineers will never write a program that the general public will interact with, but they will need to run simulations and develop new computational tools and models to do analysis and make data driven design decisions. Interacting with advanced computing tools requires a high level of computer literacy. K-12 educators are working to provide additional enrichment in this area, but it tends to be elective and provided if resources allow. Given that schools are providing different opportunities if any, students entering college-level engineering and computing programs are arriving with a growing diversity of computing experience. This leads to a frustratingly high range of student capability for introductory engineering programming courses, making it difficult to design the course to best serve all students in the course. There are a couple options to help resolve this issue. The first is to create a new preparatory course to provide those with little prior computing experience. The second is to take the existing first computing course and offer a stretch version (2 semesters instead of one). In the latter option, the content of the original course is spread out over two semesters with more examples and class time devoted to the content. The slower delivery allows for more time to ask questions, get assistance, and complete programming assignments. This paper discusses the structure of this parallel stretch course sequence along with the addition of a parachute option, enabling students who struggle early in the one-semester course to switch to the two-semester stretch course. We are also allowing students who struggled in the second half of the one-semester course to take the second stretch course. Rather than repeat all the content, they can spend an entire semester mastering the topics they struggled with. The paper discusses the benefits of this approach, which is primarily increased flexibility, enabling students with diverse backgrounds to have a path that best suits their needs. The main challenges comes with advising students and identifying students who would benefit from the new stretch option.