SELF: Student Lab Framework for Improving Engagement and Learning Teaching Java programming to undergraduate students is a challenge as they have widely different prior programming experience. New learners find it difficult to cope with programming concepts, syntax, and implementation. To ease the learning process and to motivate the students to learn programming concepts, we let junior undergraduate students independently define the lab exercises, course project, and choose coding tool of their choice. To engage the experienced learnersu0027 and improve the new learnersu0027 confidence for implementing Java concepts, we also used peer learning along with this technique. Experienced programmers and new learners worked together in a group to deliver a project at the end of the semester. Our results show that students (81%) are able to define reasonably well lab work and projects, and execute them well, when they are involved in defining the learning tasks. 89% of the students found that this approach was effective in motivating them to learn the programming course.

An exploration of STEM freshmens attitudes, engagement and autonomous learning in introductory computer programming Programming skills and computational thinking are fundamental concerns in professional training in Science, Technologyxe2x80x99 Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In spite of this, in the Chilean higher education system, as in most parts of the world, teaching programming is a challenging endeavor, partly because the majority of freshmen students in STEM undergraduate programs have not been introduced to the fundamentals of the discipline and its applications in K12 education. Therefore, studentsu0027 attitudes, engagement, and autonomous learning can make a difference in how students in STEM disciplines in higher education face their first programming course. In the present study, we carried out measurement of variables associated to these constructs involving a sample of 1694 freshmen of seventeen STEM programs in a Chilean research university. Relevant differences were found among different STEM programs, and by student gender. Implications of the results obtained and future research avenues are discussed.