Factors Affecting Engineering Students in Learning the Programming Subject at UiTM Pulau Pinang: A Study on Educators' Ability

Abstract

Teaching the subject of computer programming, especially to engineering students at higher education institutions requires a comprehensive teaching approach, modifiable pedagogy and hybrid creativity to generate an attractive and realistic learning environment. This research was conducted demonstrating that the students are not attentive to learning the programming subject owing to several factors. This paper concentrates on the factors related to educators as the contributors to the students’ attraction to learn the programming subject. This study was conducted at Universiti Teknologi MARA, Pulau Pinang Branch with a total of 241 students from the engineering school responding to the online survey. Through the mean and the standard deviation analysis, it was found that the educators’ roles affected the students’ attraction and understanding ability in learning the programming subject. This finding can help the educators to improvise and upgrade their teaching approach to make the computer programming class fascinating and enhance the students’ learning curve.