Developing a Technology Enhanced Cs0 Course for Engineering Students

The CS0 course in the curriculum typically has the role of introducing students into basic concepts and terminology of computer science. Hence, it is used to form a base on which the subsequent programming courses can build on. However, much of the effort to build better methodologies for courses is spent on introductory programming courses instead of the earlier course. In this article we present an experiment where a CS0 course at our university was redesigned to utilize educational technology and automatic assessment. The redesign was based on a collaborative education platform called ViLLE. New automatically assessed exercise types with immediate feedback were designed and utilized with already existing ones to cover all topics taught in the course. In the paper, we present the design principles and the implementation of the electronic material for the course as well as our experiences on adapting the technology in the course. A detailed description of different exercises and other tasks are also provided. Finally, we present results and statistics collected from the course implementation.