On Fun for Teaching Large Programming Courses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a set of ten physical fun activities designed to enhance engagement and understanding in large programming courses, supported by three years of practical use and feedback from students and educators.

Contribution

It presents a novel catalogue of physical activities for teaching programming concepts in large lectures, with insights from extensive practical deployment and user feedback.

Findings

Activities help students stay focused and engaged.

Activities improve retention and understanding of concepts.

Conciseness and clarity are key to activity effectiveness.

Abstract

Teaching software development basics to hundreds of students in a frontal setting is cost-efficient and thus still common in universities. However, in a large lecture hall, students can easily get bored, distracted, and disengaged. The frontal setting can also frustrate lecturers since interaction opportunities are limited and hard to scale. Fun activities can activate students and, if well designed, can also help remember and reflect on abstract software development concepts. We present a novel catalogue of ten physical fun activities, developed over years to reflect on basic programming and software development concepts. The catalogue includes the execution of a LA-OLA algorithm as in stadiums, using paper planes to simulate object messages and pointers, and traversing a lecture hall as a tree or a recursive structure. We report our experience of using the activities in a large course with 500+ students three years in a row. We also conducted an interview study with 15 former students of the course and 14 experienced educators from around the globe. The results suggest that the fun activities can enable students to stay focused, remember key concepts, and reflect afterwards. However, keeping the activities concise and clearly linked to the concepts taught seems to be key to their acceptance and effectiveness.