A Mastery Learning Approach: an Introductory Programming Course Design for Diversified Students’ Interests

An introductory programming course such as CS1 is one of the most essential courses in terms that successive computer science (CS) courses heavily depend on students’ attainment level of CS1. In this study, we show our experience of our CS1 course to conform with diversified students’ interest. We introduce (1) “virtual small group classes”(VSCs) which are practical laboratory programming work from variety kinds of domain, along with (2) “mastery test” (MT) which is designed to assure fundamental knowledge and skills expected in CS1. Our VSCs employed five courses with different domains in year 2011 and students should challenge to create programs from at least one courses. MT is pass/fail test of which passing point is set at 86% and students can take till passing. One of the main objective of MT is to raise mastery levels of students especially who have difficulty in following the VSCs. Our experience of VSCs and MT of 2011 indicates that VSCs efficiently motivate students and encourage their engagement in programming on one side, with keeping their master levels by MT. We succeeded to start successive lectures with keeping students’ interest and required knowledge level.