Flipped Classroom Strategy to Help Underachievers in Java Programming

How to develop the programming skills in students is a big concern for most of the programming-teachers. Since programming involves higher order thinking skills, teachers use many teaching strategies to develop higher thinking skills in students. Flipped classroom is one such innovative method for achieving the same. The objective of this study was to teach programming in Java to the underachievers using the flipped classroom method and the high achievers using the traditional approach and to examine how the low achievers perform in programming with respect to the high achievers after undergoing the flipped classroom sessions. The study participants were the 4th semester students in B. Tech. Computer Science (2015 admission at Cochin University College of Engineering Kuttanadu, Kerala, India). They had a lab in data structures using Java and Java was not taught in the class as part of the syllabus. Hence, the students find it difficult to do the data structures lab, which motivated the authors to teach them Java as evening classes. The students were asked to rate their programming skills as either good, average, poor or very poor. Based on their feedback and their previous semester marks in programming in C++, they were classified either as underachievers or high achievers. The total duration of this extra class was fixed as ten hours for each group. After the fifth and tenth classes, same tests were conducted for both the groups and the results were analyzed using t-test. The results showed that the low achievers in the flipped classroom performed at par with the high achievers of the traditional classroom.