Course development through student-faculty collaboration: a case study

Traditionally, faculty plan and implement courses with students as the target audience, based upon educational goals and objectives. With today's interest in active learning, faculty try to anticipate activities that will resonate with students. This paper presents a different model that utilizes faculty-student collaboration for course development -- in this case, creating an introductory C-based course on imperative problem solving with robots as an application theme. Basing development on course goals and objectives, a faculty member works with a development team of undergraduate students to structure course content, prepare materials (e.g., readings, laboratory exercises, projects), and test each element of the course. In subsequent semesters, students taking the course provide feedback on all materials, the development team updates materials, and the refinement process iterates. The resulting course meets goals and objectives, provides wonderful motivation, and highlights creativity and intellectual challenge within computer science as well as syntax, semantics, and core technical skills. This paper builds upon a previous report (SIGCSE 2013 Proceedings, pp. 27-32), by highlighting the course development process and providing data that assess course effectiveness. The resulting course has been identified as an "exemplar" by CS Curricula 2013 (pp. 454-455, 458-459), providing a strong second course in a three-course, multi-paradigm introductory sequence that emphasizes a lab-based approach with collaborative learning. Course materials at co-author Walker's home page.