Creating Economy Active Learning Classrooms for IT Students

Active learning and active learning classrooms can enhance students' classroom performance and experience and the technology and collaborative nature of active learning classrooms are similar to what IT students can expect to encounter during their careers. One difficulty in providing more students with access to active learning classrooms is the cost associated with creating new spaces or retrofitting existing spaces. State-of-the-art active learning classroom designs, such as those showcased elsewhere in the literature, can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct. In this work we describe the modification of an existing IT lab to create an economical active learning classroom. Our experience is that even with limited resources it is possible to create a productive space that students find helpful and that mimics state-of-the-art active learning classrooms. Also provided is an overview of the theoretical foundations of active learning classrooms and active learning and some preliminary results from the use of such a classroom for an introductory programming course.