Evolving an Introductory Programming Course: Impacts of Student Self-Empowerment, Guided Hands-On Times, and Self-Directed Training

In this paper, the impacts that the evolutionary development of an introductory programming course has on student achievements is described. For the introduction of pass/fail grading with student self empowerment through tokens, a significant increase in performance for programming assignments, quizzes, and total semester scores can be found. Furthermore, increased times of instructor guided hands on programming exercises have a positive effect as well. Thirdly, a strong correlation between how well students perform on an automatically scored self directed online programming training environment and their achievements in programming assignments, quizzes, and the entire semester can be observed. In turn, the inclusion of these types of environments can benefit students significantly while introducing only little overhead for course instructors. The active utilization of these additional hands on training options represents a significant potential to increase the total semester performance and should be actively communicated to students.