Increasing Motivation of CS1 Non-Majors through an Approach Contextualized by Games and Media

This innovative practice full paper reports our attempts to increase motivation of CS1 non-major students through an approach contextualized by games and media. We report our experience to conceive and deliver an introductory programming course for CS non-majors. We used a mixed approach which combines Scratch with game creation, and Python with both turtle graphics and image manipulation in order reduce initial barriers to learning and increase student motivation by using different contexts. The course was given to university-level, freshman, civil engineering students who take programming as a required first-term course. The main lessons learned were: a spiral approach over programming content reduces cognitive load and facilitates learning; careful design for a transition between tools/languages is crucial to minimize difficulties; games and media bring freshmen closer to the programming world; and playful contexts improve motivation, but only to a certain extent.