Examining Software Design Projects in a First-Year Engineering Course: The Impact of the Project Type on Programming Complexity and Programming Fundamentals Required

This Innovative Practice work-in-progress paper examines a game software design project implemented at a large Midwestern university to replace prior end of term projects. The use of end of term projects for introductory software courses can increase student engagement and provide a way to summarize and synthesize topics learned in the course. Previous research has shown student's perceptions of the game project to be positive. This current work examines a sample set of programming source code submissions for the Source Lines of Code metric and counts of the instances of certain programming fundamentals (input/output, repetition structures, selection structures). The results show that the game projects had significantly higher effort required when examining these metrics compared to the prior end of term projects. This preliminary work will lead to additional analysis of the full set of source code submissions, as well as, different metrics to measure complexity of the submissions.