It is important that engineering courses offer a learning environment that avoids the use of contrived, watered-down exercises, so that learning is thorough and retention is assured. To that end, a problem based on material already familiar to the students was sought for Freshman Engineering Honors programming classes. It was hoped that this would provide sufficient challenge in the program design and coding that the lack of a heavy technical slant to the problem would not dim the students' enthusiasm for the project.One answer is a project in basketball statistics, including data entry, data management, and report generation, that found most students enthusiasticfrom the day of its assignment. The first part of the project requires students to do the most fundamental activity of all: gain an understanding of the problem they are solving. To accomplish this, they collect basketball statistics, using paper and pencil (forms are provided) for a high school game from videotape. This allows the use of stop action, slow motion, and other electronic aids in their data collection activities. Of course, they are made to realize that the end use of their software is far less kind, requiring the collection of data in a live setting.While the first part of the project must be completed by every individual, the remainder is performed by four-member project teams, utilized throughout the course to prepare students for the group-oriented work place. In Part II, the students design the user interface and data storage, then generate the code, written in the C language, for all parts of the data entry and report generation activities. The result of all this student effort is an improved knowledge of the C language, a great improvement in problem-solving skills, and a marked increase in the students' confidence in their ability to incorporate the use of the computer and of programming languages and skills into their everyday work.
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