Enhancing the first year transitional experience

Designing and delivering a first year curriculum experience which both challenges and inspires students to engage and develop to the best of their ability; whilst simultaneously facilitating their transition to higher education (HE) is a challenge facing many institutions. This paper presents a multi-faceted approach to addressing the challenges of widening participation and retention within a HE context. It will concentrate on the approaches developed and implemented to facilitate student transition to the HE environment in general and the computing domain specifically. These approaches are then evaluated resulting in the conclusion that while they are often highly resource intensive, results show they do help to retain students.