First year computer science programming has always been a challenge for many students as the course expectation is not only for them to be able to understand programming concepts, but also to produce creative solutions to problems. Team-based learning seems a natural solution to increase the amount of practice each student will get, and to increase students' interest and confidence. The initial results of these two years of experimentation with teambased learning suggests that it helps reduce the dropping rate in the class to a reasonable level (10%) and give greater confidence to students in their ability to succeed. In this paper, we present how team-based learning has been adapted for our first semester programming class and we discuss the advantages of this techniques and difficulties encountered.

Many active learning techniques have been used and described over the years, including team-based learning (TBL). While this technique is well established, it is only recently that analyses that compare it to other teaching techniques have been reported. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of team-based learning on two major concerns for computer science instructors: the drop/attrition rates, and students' success in CS1. The results show some major improvements both in terms of the drop rate and students' success, as measured by final exam grades. For example, the number of students obtaining 50% or more on the final exam has increased from 54% to 75.5%. Moreover, the drop rate has decreased from more than 30% to 6.4%.

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