Effects of extending the length of MIT’s Introduction to Computer Science course on the performance of students with little programming experience

Abstract

Since Fall 2007, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT has offered every semester an introduction to computer science course roughly split in two smaller parts. The first part, labeled as 6.0001 since Fall 2014, has the goal of teaching students basic computational thinking programming skills and the ability to read, craft and understand simple algorithms; whereas the second part, labeled as 6.0002 since Fall 2014, has the goal of introducing students to data science and teaching skills required to reason about, perform and interpret computational experiments. Each course runs for half a standard MIT semester, which requires that introductory concepts be taught at a very fast pace, which may prove very difficult for students who had little programming experience beforehand. Starting in Fall 2021, the Department has offered a parallel new course, 6.S061, whose overall goal is exactly the same as 6.0001, but is designed to run for an entire semester, and is aimed towards students with little to no prior experience in the area. The proposed thesis will analyze the impact of offering the introductory course at a slower pace by studying the overall performance of students in these two courses as well as on a follow-up course, as well as any effects on students who started taking one version of the course and later changed to a different version.