How to handle large classrooms of engineering students: Sharing experiences with applying three methods/practices including evaluation results and personal feedback

Abstract

To handle large classrooms of students is a every-lecture-challenge that requires the lecturer to constantly apply new ideas and new practices so as to keep the students focused and to stay in touch with them. Furthermore, these ideas have to be adjusted from lecture to lecture. The purpose of this paper is to share experiences with some new, recently popular and with some older practices, such as classroom interactions via smartphone response, workshop-like interactions and starting the first lecture each term by presenting only problems within the subject to teach. All methods are supposed to increase the concentration level of the students and to enable an effective lecturer-students interaction. Briefly these methods/practices are described and also the way in which they were used, prepared and organized, how they worked out, how the students reacted and how the lecturer felt about it and experienced the various methods during large classroom lectures. All described methods were used while teaching programming (a two-semester computer science course) to electrical and mechanical engineering first year students at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Technical Journalism at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences in the last couple of years.