Adaptation of team-based learning on a first term programming class

摘要

First year computer science programming has always been a challenge for many students as the course expectation is not only for them to be able to understand programming concepts, but also to produce creative solutions to problems. Team-based learning seems a natural solution to increase the amount of practice each student will get, and to increase students' interest and confidence. The initial results of these two years of experimentation with team-based learning suggests that it helps reduce the dropping rate in the class to a reasonable level (10%) and give greater confidence to students in their ability to succeed. In this paper, we present how team-based learning has been adapted for our first semester programming class and we discuss the advantages of this techniques and difficulties encountered.