Search for: All records

Over the past three years we have been exploring not only how computational thinking impacts the first-year student experience but also persistence to graduation and enculturation to engineering. Students matriculate to engineering degrees with different academic preparation in mathematics and computing. We began our work by designing a computational thinking diagnostic that can be administered to students as they enter the engineering program in order to determine student's ability to use the principles and practices that are learned by studying computing. We can report that 3584 students were participants during the development of the Engineering Computational Thinking Diagnostic (ECTD) and the last 469 were involved in exploratory and confirmatory analysis. 

This research category paper examines the impact of computational thinking within first-year engineering courses on student pathways into engineering. Computational thinking and programming appear in many introductory engineering courses. Prior work found that early computational thinking development is critical to the formation of engineers. This qualitative research paper extends the research by documenting how pre-university privileges impact first-year student trajectories into engineering through a qualitative examination of student interviews from three institutions with different processes for matriculation into engineering majors. We identify the underlying assumptions of meritocracy that are concealing the role of educational privilege in selecting which engineering students will be allowed to join the field. We provide a suggestion for how institutions can include computational thinking in introductory engineering courses with less risk of furthering the marginalization of students with few academic privileges.