Enhancing the student engagement in an introductory programming: A holistic approach in improving the student grade in the Informatics Department of the University of Surabaya

Student engagement has long been known can increase the student performance. However bring this concept to practice may not be as easy as it sounds. Some factors, such as the teacher, the students and their background, the course content, the academic atmosphere, the study culture, etc., influence its implementation. This paper presents the practice that is applied in the Informatics Department of the University of Surabaya to enhance the student engagement in the introductory programming course (i.e. Algorithm and Programming). This course is one of the course that is commonly known as difficult and make many Informatics students in the University of Surabaya dropped their study in the Department. The practice to enhance the student engagement in the Informatics Department of the University of Surabaya is designed to fit best with the condition in the Department. As a result, the students’ performance increase two grade level compared to the students’ performance in the previous years