Title
Combining Agile Practices with Incremental Visual Tasks.
Abstract
Many employers are demanding graduates acquire project experience especially in an agile environment. Final year projects alone cannot equip students adequately unless they have already gained a solid foundation in the underlying principles, technologies and processes. Students should ideally be exposed to Software Engineering (SE) principles from their first programming course. However, the core principles such as agility, extensibility, reusability and maintainability are often too abstract for novice programmers. This paper presents an active learning approach using our visual framework Iteron. Iteron extends our prior work using a visual constructivist approach by allowing SE principles and agile practices to be interspersed with programming constructs such as arrays and methods. Students' feedback on learning outcomes was very positive as they found this approach both engaging and challenging. Performance in the follow-on assignment and the final exam showed a substantial improvement after introducing Iteron. Moreover, a much stronger correlation was noted between individual student performance in the initial assignment and the final exam.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3013499.3013510
ACE
Field
DocType
Citations 
Constructivism (philosophy of education),Constructivist teaching methods,Active learning,Software engineering,Computer science,Visualization,Agile software development,Extensibility,Maintainability,Reusability
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
22
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Charles Thevathayan1185.10
Maria Spichkova27525.14
Margaret Hamilton34413.71