Engagement and frustration in programming projects
Stuart A. Hansen, Erica Eddy · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · 2007
Attracting and retaining quality students is an ongoing concern in Computer Science. Retention can be enhanced by keeping students engaged in the learning process while preventing them from becoming overly frustrated. While engaging students during class is certainly important, most students spend a significant amount of time working on programming projects outside of class. The goal of this research was to collect and analyze some initial data on how engaging and frustrating our students find our programming projects. During the Spring 2006 semester we surveyed our students after each programming project. This paper presents some initial findings from the surveys and discusses strategies on how to improve our projects based on this feedback.