Non-Major Peer Mentoring for CS1

One of the key challenges associated with Computer Science I (CS1) curricula is that of student satisfaction which directly translates to success and retention. This challenge is exacerbated at small institutions in which departmental enrollment is low overall. One area that has shown much promise is that in which peer mentors are provided to augment existing lecture and laboratory components in order to better assist the students. This approach has found success at both large and small institutions where student demographics and populations are widely varied. In most implementations, the peer mentor is a departmental student (CS major) who has previously taken and excelled in the course. This does not however, account for those students enrolled in the course as non-majors. At many institutions, the typical CS1 course may count as an elective course necessary for graduation or to fulfill another majors requirements. In this situation, non-major students are often cited as feeling excluded, which then becomes the reason the student does not seek the necessary help that is required to find success within the course. In this work, we propose a non-major peer mentoring implementation to augment existing departmental-level tutoring in order to better assist all student backgrounds. We provide the feedback from the students that motivated this change, as well as the proposed infrastructure necessary for such an implementation to find success. We conclude this paper with analysis of the impact this implementation has had on non-major students in a small liberal arts CS1 course.