2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In 2017, we introduced a teaching method called many small programs (MSPs) in the CS1 courses at our university. Instead of teaching via one large programming assignment (OLP) each week, MSPs allow the instructor to assign multiple programming assignments, for example 5 or more, each week instead. Our previous studies have shown that MSPs can improve the student experience by reducing stress and increasing student satisfaction in the course. Furthermore, MSPs have been shown to improve student grade performance in CS1, especially on the coding portion of exams. In a follow-up study, we gained insight on how students were using MSPs, and learned that students use MSPs in ways beneficial to their learning. Students spend sufficient time working on MSPs each week, start working on MSPs earlier, complete more MSPs than required (given a weekly full-credit threshold), take advantage of pivoting (switch to another program if stuck on the current one), and use MSPs more to study for exams. We have shared these findings with universities around the nation; causing other universities to switch from teaching CS1 with OLPs to MSPs. Given data on student MSP submissions from other schools, we extend our work to include MSPs taught at other universities. We perform similar analysis and found that students being taught via MSPs from other universities also use MSPs in beneficial ways. Students spend sufficient time working on MSPs each week, they start working on MSPs early, and they complete a majority of assigned MSPs each week.