Students can differ in many aspects, social background, educational background, motivation and expectations for the course. The differences in educational background (VWO, HAVO or MBO) can make it difficult to find a teaching method that suitsall of our first year students.

A teacher from CMD has come up with an idea to cater to different groups within the classroom. She teaches an introductory course in coding, HTML and CSS. She has designed the course in three different set ups. By analogy with the (European) classification of ski slopes, she developed three tracks through the course: a gentle blue track, a more adventurous red track and an Olympic black track. The blue track and the red track were presented as equivalent in terms of content, the black track mainly consisted of follow-up materials. Students were free to choose the track they wanted to follow.

The aim was to challenge all students. She wanted to enable novices to discover their enthusiasm for coding (if applicable), to stimulate students who are eager to learn it, but also to design a course that is achievable for these students who consider coding as a necessary evil.

She researched which tracks the students choose and tried to answer the question:  “is it possible to predict which track students would choose based on gender, educational background or motivation for learning to code?”, the short answer is so. So it is not easy to divide the groups into subgroups based on these variables.

The research showed however that the course efficacy increased from 65% to almost 73% with the new design. More information on the design and research can be found in the article “Empowering to code a diverse population of future digital designers” or contact our colleagues of Education & Research (O&O).