Learning Java in a New York City immigrant engineer retraining program
Suzanna Schmeelk, Fred L. Fontaine, Larisa Ackerman, Alfred V. Aho · 2017
This research explores the psychology of programming and the pedagogical environment in a certificate granting urban immigrant engineer retraining program in New York City. The program is aimed at teaching under-represented immigrant engineer students to learn how to program in the Java programming language. The programming concepts and the fostered pedagogical environment were implemented in three-hour evening sessions over 15 weeks in which the students were encouraged to develop programming communities while working on computational thinking concept strands. The research findings that we report are threefold. First, we report on how we fostered building programming concepts into the curriculum into a set of activities specifically designed for an immigrant engineer retraining program with students ranging in backgrounds. We found that at that the program curriculum must be flexible enough for student learning regardless of the fact that a student may miss sessions. Second, we report on how an effective pedagogical environment, which fosters student-centered learning, was promoted so that the students could construct their own meanings of the programming concepts. Third, we report on implementation strategies unique to a retraining program, such as specific environmental constraints as well as how sessions were partitioned into components that fostered computational thinking while learning Java. Our findings provide unique insights into intervention constraints for an urban retraining program which can be used to guide and inform further retraining computer learning program research.