Can graduating students design

Loftus, Chris; Thomas, Lynda; Zander, Carol

doi:10.1145/1953163.1953199

Cited by 40 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Our conclusion that the activities of students are rather code-oriented (as opposed to problem-oriented) is in line with the observation that students tend to produce a problem analysis that is far from complete [25].…”

Section: Reflection On the Findingssupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Not analyzing the problem well enough appears to be the main problem in designing the desired system [25].…”

Section: Software Design and Redesignmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many graduating students turn out to be unable to create a proper software design [14,25]. Students struggle with the application of concepts such as abstraction and polymorphism [28] and information hiding [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Analyzing students' software redesign strategies

Stuurman

Passier

Barendsen

2016

Proceedings of the 16th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

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The design of software is known to be difficult for novice computer scientists. In this paper, we focus on software redesign and on the refactoring necessary to implement a redesign. Redesigning an application aims to improve nonfunctional aspects such as extensibility, without changing the functionality. Redesign is a complex task, involving knowledge and skills from software design in general and the use of design patterns in particular. This study is part of an educational design research project aiming at developing scaffolding for students' software redesign activities in the form of procedural guidance. We investigated students' strategies and usage of concepts during a software redesign assignment using students' reports and team colllaboration recordings as data sources, thus focusing on the process instead of on the design results, in contrast with existing studies. We identified several difficulties that can serve as starting points for procedural guidance. For instance, students seem to avoid using a structured analysis method. Our findings indicate that students' activities were mainly directed towards the code rather than the design problem.

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Section: Reflection On the Findingssupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Not analyzing the problem well enough appears to be the main problem in designing the desired system [25].…”

Section: Software Design and Redesignmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Analyzing students' software redesign strategies

Stuurman

Passier

Barendsen

2016

Proceedings of the 16th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

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“…The research of Bullen et al (2009) examined workforce trends in IT-provider companies and encountered problems in the following areas: graduates who are not trained in areas that the marketplace is seeking; thin pipeline for specific technical skills; increasing pressure to source IT capability; and lag in university responsiveness to the needs of the marketplace. To effectively fill this gap between the knowledge and skills demanded by the industry and the knowledge and skills gained by graduates of university computing courses, it would be necessary, on the one hand, to guarantee that the educational programmes provide the knowledge required for the job profiles suggested by industry and on the other hand, to ensure that this knowledge is taught in a manner enabling future professionals to correctly tackle the problems that they will face during their professional career (Loftus et al, 2011). …”

Section: The Education Of New Graduatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industry’s perception of the relevance of software development education

Liebenberg

Huisman

Mentz

2015

TDSA

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It is widely acknowledged that there is a shortage of software developers, not only in South Africa, but also worldwide. Despite reports, in mostly quantitative studies, of a gap between the industry needs and software development education, the view the industry has of the new graduates and the problems, challenges and solutions in respect of software development education has not been explored in detail. This article reports on a mixed methods study of the relevance of software development education from the perspective of the industry. The analysis reveals some interesting views held by the industry, as well as by the different generations on their new recruits and the problems and challenges that are faced. The following solutions to the problems are suggested: teamwork; projects and experience; work-integrated-learning and mentoring; technical and soft skills; keeping up to date; career guidance; introspection; and generational awareness.

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“…The development of programming expertise has received much attention over many years, from Soloway's rainfall problem [12] to investigations into how students design software systems [6] [3]. The consensus is that students find programming a difficult skill to develop, especially the transition from novice to intermediate programmer.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Summer of code: assisting distance-learning students with open-ended programming tasks

Smith

Richards

Cabrero

2018

Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

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A significant difficulty in teaching programming lies in the transition from novice to intermediate programmer, characterised by the assimilation and use of schemas of standard programming approaches. A significant factor assisting this transition is practice with tasks which develop this schema use. We describe the Summer of Code, a two-week activity for part-time, distance-learning students which gave them some additional programming practice. We analysed their submissions, forum postings, and results of a terminal survey. We found learners were keen to share and discuss their solutions and persevered with individual problems and the challenge overall. 93% respondents rated the activity 3 or better on a 5-point Likert scale (n=58). However, a quarter of participants, mainly those who described themselves as average or poor programmers, felt less confident in their abilities after the activity, though half of these students liked the activity overall. 54% of all participants said the greatest challenge was developing a general approach to the problems, such as selecting appropriate data structures. This is corroborated by forum comments, where students greatly appreciated "think aloud" presentations by faculty tackling the problems. These results strongly suggest that students would benefit from more open-ended practice, where they have to select and design their own solutions to a range of problems.

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Can graduating students design

Cited by 40 publications

References 5 publications

Analyzing students' software redesign strategies

Analyzing students' software redesign strategies

Industry’s perception of the relevance of software development education

Summer of code: assisting distance-learning students with open-ended programming tasks

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