A Study of First Year Undergraduate Computing Students\u27 Experience of Learning Software Development in the Absence of a Software Development Process

Despite the ever-growing demand for software development graduates, it is recognised that a significant barrier for increasing graduate numbers lies in the inherent difficulty in learning how to develop software. This paper presents a study that is part of a larger research project aimed at addressing the gap in the provision of educational software development processes for freshman, novice undergraduate learners, to improve proficiency levels. As a means of understanding how such learners problem solve in software development in the absence of a formal process, this study examines the experiences and depth of learning acquired by a sample set of novice, freshman university learners. The study finds that without the scaffolding of an appropriate structured development process tailored to novices, students are in danger of failing to engage with the problem solving skills necessary for software development, particularly the skill of designing solutions prior to coding

Programmeerimise sissejuhatava kursuse õppijate teadmisi ja oskusi mõõtev test

Programmeerimise õpetamisel tuleb pöörata tähelepanu õppijate teadmiste ja oskuste taseme hindamisele nii õppe alguses kui ka selle lõppemisel. Seda saab teha testi vormis. Magistritöö eesmärgiks on luua valideeritud test, mille abil saab hinnata õppijate teadmisi ja oskusi programmeerimiskursuse “Tehnoloogia tarbijast loojaks” alguses ja/või lõpus. Töö esimeses peatükis on toodud ülevaade Venemaal ja USAs kasutusel olevatest valideeritud testidest. Töö teises peatükis on kirjeldatud testi loomise protseduuri ning piloteerimise protsessi. Töö tulemusena loodud test piloteeriti kursuse “Tehnoloogia tarbijast loojaks” arvestustööks ettevalmistava testina. Võib öelda, et testi on võimalik kasutada nimetatud kursuse õppijate teadmiste ja oskuste hindamisel

The Design and Evaluation of an Educational Software Development Process for First Year Computing Undergraduates

First year, undergraduate computing students experience a series of well-known challenges when learning how to design and develop software solutions. These challenges, which include a failure to engage effectively with planning solutions prior to implementation ultimately impact upon the students’ competency and their retention beyond the first year of their studies. In the software industry, software development processes systematically guide the development of software solutions through iterations of analysis, design, implementation and testing. Industry-standard processes are, however, unsuitable for novice programmers as they require prior programming knowledge. This study investigates how a researcher-designed educational software development process could be created for novice undergraduate learners, and the impact of this process on their competence in learning how to develop software solutions. Based on an Action Research methodology that ran over three cycles, this research demonstrates how an educational software development methodology (termed FRESH) and its operationalised process (termed CADET which is a concrete implementation of the FRESH methodology), was designed and implemented as an educational tool for enhancing student engagement and competency in software development. Through CADET, students were reframed as software developers who understand the value in planning and developing software solutions, and not as programmers who prematurely try to implement solutions. While there remain opportunities to further enhance the technical sophistication of the process as it is implemented in practice, CADET enabled the software development steps of analysis and design to be explicit elements of developing software solutions, rather than their more typically implicit inclusion in introductory CS courses. The research contributes to the field of computing education by exploring the possibilities of – and by concretely generating – an appropriate scaffolded methodology and process; by illustrating the use of computational thinking and threshold concepts in software development; and by providing a novel evaluation framework (termed AKM-SOLO) to aid in the continuous improvement of educational processes and courses by measuring student learning experiences and competencies