Introduction Teaching programming to large groups of students, particularly those with no prior experience, presents a unique set of challenges. These challenges include maintaining student engagement, ensuring comprehension across varying levels of aptitude, and managing the logistics of delivering instruction to hundreds of learners simultaneously. An overview of the main challenges in teaching programming concepts to large student classes is shown in Figure 1. • In a large classroom, students often have varying levels of familiarity with computational thinking, leading to disparities in each student’s learning pace. • Large classes have a high student-to-teacher ratio, resulting in limited individual attention and difficulty addressing specific student needs and questions in real time. • In addition, providing timely and meaningful feedback to large numbers of students is logistically challenging, albeit critical for effective learning. The South African primary and secondary school landscape comprises expensive, well-resourced schools equipped with access to cutting-edge digital technologies at the high-end spectrum to poorly resourced, no-fee schools with no digital tools or Internet access at the other end. This means that the education system in South Africa is one of the most unequal in the world (Hart, 2023). The practice of teaching basic computational thinking and programming concepts to undergraduate Engineering Science students with no or limited exposure to computing technology in their home or school environments is complex. The current undergraduate engineering acceptance criteria in all South African universities require a student to obtain a specific mark in the final matriculation exam for Mathematics, Physical Sciences and English. Given the limited number of universities in South Africa, most engineering students exceed these minimum requirements. The diversity of undergraduate student backgrounds means that each yearly cohort will have students who have completed a three-year Information Technology subject at the high school level and students who have had no computer exposure at high school. This article explores evidencebased strategies based on our experience teaching basic computational and C programming concepts to large cohorts, leveraging the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to inform best practices. Figure 1: Overview of the main challenges in teaching large classes Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching Innovation Projects 2024 105
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