Initial Development & Assessment of a Video Library for Teaching Foundational Computing Concepts in Non-Computer Science Classes

Increasingly, students with no prior computer science (CS) training are introduced to programming in non-CS courses, reflecting the rising importance of computational methods across disciplines. Non-CS faculty teaching such courses with a computational component are often unsure how to best teach the computing concepts their students need, and their students struggle to apply to new problems the computational solutions they have seen before. This paper describes surveys and an exploration of teaching materials undertaken at three liberal arts colleges to better understand what computing tasks students in non-CS courses are expected to master and how computing is taught in these courses. We identified a set of computing tasks that faculty across disciplines indicate to be relevant for their courses: collecting data, preparing data, translating data, data visualization, and navigating the file system. Our exploration of teaching material revealed, however, that faculty devote relatively little time to teaching the foundational computing concepts that underlie these tasks, such as variable naming and assignment, basic control flow, working memory vs. persistent storage. We propose that students’ computational problem solving skills can be strengthened by integrating more robust teaching of foundational computing concepts into non-CS courses. To support non-CS faculty in doing so, we developed a library of short videos on foundational computing concepts that can be flexibly integrated into existing course structures. In an initial evaluation, faculty piloted the library in courses from across the sciences, social sciences, and math and found the video library helpful for teaching computing skills.