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The paper investigates and poses a number of potent solutions to the problem of teaching programming and other technical topics to students who are neither technically skilled nor aspired to learn these. The research has been done over a period of five years at the bachelor part of the relatively new multidisciplinary engineering education Medialogy at Aalborg University Copenhagen. The education was developed to meet new demands from the interactive media industry and have during the last seven years educated hundreds of bachelors and candidates to fill the void between the many creative fields of media, art, design, and the technical engineering disciplines. Since the dawn of Medialogy it has been the goal to attract young creative artistic students with an interest in technology and media.
Through the research presented in this paper it became evident that the education attracted several types of students, including a large group passionate about the artistic/content part of media, art, and design; and with no or little motivation to change their aim and learn technical disciplines to meet the new demands of the industry. The challenge was to find a pedagogical approach for teaching technical topics.
The paper deals with programming, and will explain different steps of a new programming course in detail, and relate students test data to each of the initiatives causing the leaps of improvement. Furthermore the students’ technical abilities and enhanced balance between the interdisciplinary disciplines of the study are analysed. The conclusion is that the technical courses have got a higher status for the students. The students now see it as a very important basis for their further study, and their learning results have improved to a more than satisfactory level seen from the study board’s point of view.