research-article

Understanding students' preferences of software engineering projects

Authors:

Thérèse Smith,

Swapna Gokhale,

Robert McCartneyAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '14: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education

Pages 135 - 140

https://doi.org/10.1145/2591708.2591753

Published: 21 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Students in a maintenance-centric, introductory software engineering course were expected to understand, analyze and extend an open source software project of their choice, selected from a limited set of prepared applications. Students fell into two groups: those who chose a project based on its perceived and estimated difficulty, and those who chose a project based on the appeal of the subject matter. Students in both groups, however, cited value for themselves in terms of enhanced learning experience, and for users in terms of increased benefit, as reasons for their selection. These insights into students' thinking can guide future efforts in selecting projects that can simultaneously support the learning objectives as well as motivate the students, not only in software engineering but also in broader computing courses.

References

[1]

http://opensource.gsfc.nasa.gov/projects/JAT/index.php.

[2]

E. Allen, R. Cartwright, and B. Stoler. DrJava: A lightweight pedagogic environment for Java. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 34(1):137--141, 2002.

Digital Library

[3]

J. Bayzick, B. Askins, S. Kalafut, and M. Spear. Reading mobile games throughout the curriculum. In Proc. of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 209--214, 2013.

Digital Library

[4]

V. Braun and V. Clarke. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2):77--101, 2006.

[5]

V. A. Cicirello. Experiences with real projects for real clients course on software engineering at a liberal arts instituition. The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, page 50, 2013.

Digital Library

[6]

J. D. N. Dionisio, C. L. Dickson, S. E. August, P. Dorin, and R. Toal. An open source software culture in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 39(2):70--74, 2007.

Digital Library

[7]

H. Ellis, R. A. Morelli, and G. W. Hislop. Support for educating software engineers through humanitarian open source projects. In Proc. of Intl. Conf. on Software Engineering Education and Training Workshop, pages 1--4, 2008.

Digital Library

[8]

C. Ghezzi, M. Jazayeri, and D. Mandrioli. Fundamentals of Software Engineering. Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2003.

Digital Library

[9]

S. Gokhale, T. Smith, and R. McCartney. Integrating open source software into software engineering curriculum: Challenges in selecting projects. In Proc. of First Intl. Workshop on Software Engineering Education based on Real-World Experiences, pages 9--12, Zurich,Switzerland, 2012.

[10]

E. P. Katz. Software engineering practicum course experience. In Proc. of Intl. Conf. on Software Engineering Education and Training, pages 169--172, 2010.

Digital Library

[11]

L. Layman, L. Williams, K. Slaten, S. Berenson, and M. Vouk. Addressing diverse needs through a balance of agile and plan-driven software development methodologies in the core software engineering course. Intl. J. of Engineering Education, 24(4):659, 2008.

[12]

B. K. MacKellar, M. Sabin, and A. Tucker. Scaling a framework for client-driven open source software projects: A report from three schools. The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, page 140, 2013.

Digital Library

[13]

R. McCartney, S. Gokhale, and T. Smith. "Evaluating an early software engineering course with projects and tools from open source software". In Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Computing Education Research, pages 5--10, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012.

Digital Library

[14]

A. Meneely, L. Williams, and E. F. Gehringer. Rose: A repository of education-friendly open-source projects. SIGCSE Bull., 40(3):7--11, June 2008.

Digital Library

[15]

S. Merriam. Qualitative Research, A Guide to Design and Implementation. Jossey-Bass, 2009.

[16]

M. Nordio, C. Ghezzi, B. Meyer, E. D. Nitto, G. Tamburrelli, J. Tschannen, N. Aguirre, and V. Kulkarni. Teaching software engineering using globally distributed projects: The DOSE course. In Proc. of Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development-Community Building Workshop, 2011.

Digital Library

[17]

P. M. Papadopoulos, I. G. Stamelos, and A. Meiszner. Enhancing software engineering education through open source projects: Four years of students' perspectives. Education and Information Technologies, pages 1--17, 2012.

Digital Library

[18]

V. P. Pauca and R. T. Guy. Mobile apps for the greater good: A socially relevant approach to software engineering. In Proc. of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 535--540, 2012.

Digital Library

[19]

D. W. Shaffer and M. Resnick. "Thick" authenticity: New media and authentic learning. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 10(2):195--215, 1999.

Digital Library

[20]

J. Sillito. Saturate. http://www.saturateapp.com/groups/1311319302.

[21]

Sourceforge. Sourceforge.net: Find and develop open source software. http://sourceforge.net/.

[22]

A. Strauss and J. Corbin. Grounded theory methodology. Handbook of Qualitative Research, pages 273--285, 1994.

Cited By

Theodoropoulos ALepouras G(2022)Game Design, Gender and Personalities in Programming EducationFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2022.8249954Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2022.824995
Brito MSilva FG. Chavez CNascimento DBittencourt RKulesza UPrikladnicki RGerosa MWerner CAndrade R(2018)FLOSS in software engineering educationProceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3266237.3266249(250-259)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3266237.3266249
Prates JGarcia RMaldonado J(2018)MOOCs on the Context of Software Engineering Teaching and Training: Trends and Challenges2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2018.8658706(1-9)Online publication date: Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2018.8658706

Index Terms

Understanding students' preferences of software engineering projects
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering

Recommendations

Software Engineering Education for Bioinformatics
CSEET '09: Proceedings of the 2009 22nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training

As software engineering educators, it is important for us to realize the increasing domain-specificity of software, and incorporate these changes in our design of teaching material. Bioinformatics software is an example of immensely complex and critical ...
Automatic code generation within student's software engineering projects
WCCCE '12: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education

In this paper, we describe the integration of research and new teaching strategies into computer science and engineering departments at universities and colleges related to the automatic code generation, automatic development tools and integrated ...
Selecting open source software projects to teach software engineering
SIGCSE '14: Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education

Aspiring software engineers must be able to comprehend and evolve legacy code, which is challenging because the code may be poorly documented, ill structured, and lacking in human support. These challenges of understanding and evolving existing code can ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ITiCSE '14: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education

June 2014

378 pages

ISBN:9781450328333

DOI:10.1145/2591708

Conference Chairs:
Åsa Cajander
Uppsala University, Sweden
,
Mats Daniels
Uppsala University, Sweden
,
Program Chairs:
Tony Clear
Auckland University of Technology, NZ
,
Arnold Pears
Uppsala University, Sweden

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Bilkent University: Bilkent University
SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 June 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Division of Undergraduate Education

Conference

ITICSE '14

Sponsor:

Bilkent University
SIGCSE

ITICSE '14: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Conference 2014

June 21 - 25, 2014

Uppsala, Sweden

Acceptance Rates

ITiCSE '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 164 submissions, 22%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
148
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)2
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 20 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Theodoropoulos ALepouras G(2022)Game Design, Gender and Personalities in Programming EducationFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2022.8249954Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2022.824995
Brito MSilva FG. Chavez CNascimento DBittencourt RKulesza UPrikladnicki RGerosa MWerner CAndrade R(2018)FLOSS in software engineering educationProceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3266237.3266249(250-259)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3266237.3266249
Prates JGarcia RMaldonado J(2018)MOOCs on the Context of Software Engineering Teaching and Training: Trends and Challenges2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2018.8658706(1-9)Online publication date: Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2018.8658706

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents