Examining Software Design Projects in a First-Year Engineering Course Through Different Complexity Measures

Abstract

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress paper examines student game development software projects that replaced a prior end of term project at a large Midwestern university. 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 on a random sample of data has shown that game design projects require significantly higher student effort in the area of programming fundamentals (input/output, repetition structures, selection structures) when compared to prior end of term projects. This current work uses a custom automated Python script to analyze a much larger data set, and examines how game design projects differ from a previous project option in the areas of programming fundamentals and complexity, where complexity is measured using Lines of Code, Cyclomatic Complexity, Halstead Complexity, and Maintainability Index. The results show that when examining these metrics, the game project requires significantly higher effort as compared to the prior end of term project. This preliminary work will lead to a more in-depth analysis of the results from the automated script, as well as an analysis of additional end of course projects in first-year engineering courses.