Engaging Undergraduate Programming Students: Experiences using Lego Mindstorms NXT

In this paper, the experiences gained in adopting an approach to first year undergraduate programming classes which attempts to engage the students in problem-solving and teamworking activities are discussed. Both have a significant role to contribute in the development of employability skills. The approach taken makes use of Alice to introduce programming concepts and Lego Mindstorms NXT kits to develop Java programming skills. The module assessments combine individual and team-based components, encouraging the students to engage with their peers in order to solve the challenges they are set. This paper reports on the results achieved by the students on the module over a four year period which correlates to the introduction of the changes to the module design. The paper also considers the views of the students gathered from anonymous module evaluation forms.