Engaging Science and Engineering Students in Computing Education through Learner-Created Videos and Physical Computing Tools

The wide availability and accessibility of personal digital technologies offers students in schools and universities the opportunity to learn through the creation of their own digital artefacts. Also, the uptake of peer-learning is continuing to grow and transform in the classroom. This paper presents an innovative pedagogical approach underpinned by the learning-by-making, peer-learning and flipped classroom pedagogies. It reports on a collaboration between two university departments, involving computing undergraduate students creating sets of instructional video materials as part of their regular learning, that were then reused to teach programming skills to engineering students in the flipped classroom format. The paper addresses such outcomes for students as increased motivation and engagement, improved learning experiences, and better content understanding - both by those who created and those who reused the teaching materials. It also shows how this approach could help flipped classroom instructors to alleviate the initial burden of creating multimedia materials from scratch. Thus, the paper contributes a report on the new pedagogical approach effectiveness from three perspectives: 1) students who create teaching materials, 2) students who learn from those materials, and 3) flipped classroom instructors.