Interactive Preparatory Work in a Flipped Programming Course

The flipped classroom pedagogy is a popular framework for teaching computing courses. This pedagogy hinges on students completing the preparatory (prep) work before class. This usually requires watching videos or reading several sections from the textbook. To encourage students to do the prep work, a short multiple-choice online quiz is often given. However, despite this incentive, many students do not spend enough time on the prep work. To deal with this challenge, we introduce a new approach that is designed to be more engaging. This approach replaces the regular textbook with an interactive textbook and replaces the multiple-choice quizzes with small programming assignments, which are graded automatically to give students immediate feedback. To test the efficacy of this approach, we offered two sections of the course with the only difference being in the prep work, one (the experimental group) used the proposed approach while the other (the control group) used a standard approach. Our results suggest that students in the experimental group tended to perform better in terms of both the overall mean and the DFW rate, i.e. the proportion of students receiving a D, F, or W (withdraw) as their overall grade in the class. Further, students in the experimental group tended to report more positive attitudes to the prep work and the class overall.