Single development project

An often-cited problem in undergraduate software engineering courses states that some topics are difficult to teach in a university setting and, although laboratory work is a useful supplement to the lectures, it is difficult to make projects realistic and relevant. In recognition of this problem, and based on our past experience, we started preparing a new course by examining the pedagogies and curricular aspects of software engineering that are important for the Net Generation of software engineers.The course project described in this paper concentrates on those aspects that can be dealt with effectively within the environment, i.e., the software lifecycle, system interdependences, teamwork, and realistic yet manageable project dynamics, all supported by various means of communication. The workload per students must be balanced with their lack of knowledge and skills, so that their unpreparedness to deal with complex issues does not abate their motivation.The approach was tested on six large projects over the period of one semester. We believe that the results reflect the students’ strong interest and commitment, and demonstrate their ability to stay focused and work at a level that is well above the obvious.     

计算机专业软件工程课程设计的改革与实践

软件工程课程设计是独立学院计算机专业的一门独立实践课程,以培养学生软件开发能力为目标。针对目前独立学院计算机专业学生实训环节薄弱的问题,结合多年的教学经验,对软件工程课程设计的教学模式、MVC模式的应用、多层架构的设计等进行了探讨。通过对软件工程课程设计的改革与实践,有效地提高了学生的实际动手能力、创新能力和解决具体问题的能力,为学生今后的就业执业奠定了坚实的基础。     

Using digital technologies to redress inequities for English language learners in the English speaking mathematics classroom

This study examined the question, ‘What is the impact of a digital math intervention on secondary ELL students’ mathematical capabilities and perceptions of their future possibilities?’ The hypothesis was that through its direct effect on increasing students’ math ability and its indirect effect on increasing students’ perceived math self-efficacy, the digital intervention affects students’ perceptions of their functionings and future possibilities. A path analysis, with qualitative data nested into the design, was used to analyze the conceptualized relationships. The study was conducted with 50 ninth-and-10th-grade Hispanic students in a Colorado high school, over 6 months. The primary finding was that through its direct effect on increasing students’ math ability and its indirect effect on increasing students’ perceived math self-efficacy, the digital intervention improved students’ perceptions of their functionings and future possibilities. What this study specifically underscores is the importance of taking a coherent and purposeful approach toward the design of digital student-directed educational technology, especially for ELL students who may have specific learning needs.     

软件设计模式课程实验教学系统探索

设计模式是软件工程专业的重要核心课程,兼具理论性和实践性,但其高度的抽象性给学生学习带来较大困难.针对该课程及学生的认知特点,设计开发了一个基于Spring框架的设计模式实验教学系统-在线教务管理平台,该系统采用B/S架构,综合了多种常用设计模式,不仅展示了单个设计模式的特点,同时展示了这些设计模式在实际项目开发中的复合应用,有助于学生加深设计模式方法学理论精髓的理解,提高实践动手能力,从而为进一步掌握高级软件工程知识奠定基础.     

Personalized Learning Course Planner with E-learning DSS using user profile

Various methods of E-learning systems, based on information and communications, and geared towards improving learning effectiveness and students’ attention span, have been studied. However, most E-learning systems force students to follow the learning course or content established by a teacher. These methods are convenient, but they limit the effectiveness of E-learning.To overcome this limitation and increase effective learning, new techniques that reflect alternative learning styles, such as adaptive learning and personalized learning, have been studied. In this study, we proposed a Personalized Learning Course Planner (PLCP) that allows students to easily select the learning course they desire. User profile data was collected from the students’ initial priorities about learning contents as well as the test scores after their study. E-Learning Decision Support System (EL-DSS) in PLCP suggests an appropriate learning course organization, according to calculated results based on the user profile data.To verify the effectiveness of the proposed system, we implemented an English learning system consisting of PLCP. We conducted an experiment with 30 university students and evaluated students’ satisfaction by questionnaire analysis. The results indicate that the proposed system improved learning effectiveness and student satisfaction. Further investigation of the participants indicated that suggesting a learning course suitable for students’ previous test scores and priorities encouraged students to concentrate on the lesson.     

Design patterns for open tool integration

Design tool integration is a highly relevant area of software engineering that can greatly improve the efficiency of development processes. Design patterns have been widely recognized as important contributors to the success of software systems. This paper describes and compares two large-grain, architectural design patterns that solve specific design tool integration problems. Both patterns have been implemented and used in real-life engineering processes.     

Software engineering education: A study on conducting collaborative senior project development

Project and teamwork training is recognized as an important aspect in software engineering (SE) education. Senior projects, which often feature industrial involvement, serve the function of a ‘capstone course’ in SE curricula, by offering comprehensive training in collaborative software development. Given the characteristics of student team projects and the social aspects of software development, instructional issues in such a course must include: how to encourage teamwork, how to formalize and streamline stakeholder participation, and how to monitor students’ work, as well as sustain their desired collaborative effort throughout the development. In this paper, we present an exploratory study which highlights a particular case and introduces the meetings-flow approach. In order to investigate how this approach could contribute to the project's results, we examined its quantitative benefits in relation to the development of the project. We also conducted focus group interviews to discuss the humanistic findings and educational effects pertaining to this approach.     

Effects of a vocabulary acquisition and assessment system on students’ performance in a blended learning class for English subject

Vocabulary acquisition and assessment are regarded as the key basis for the instruction of English as a second language. However, it is time-consuming, fallible and repetitive for the school teachers and parents to assess the proficiency of the students’ vocabulary acquisition. We customized the open source course management system Moodle to build the individualized vocabulary review and assessment functions for English instruction. This web-based system was integrated into the regular English instruction of an experiment class of Grade three in a junior middle school, i.e. it was used in one school hour almost every week for an entire school term. Within this blended learning environment, the students’ performance of the experiment class in the ordinary and especially vocabulary examinations throughout the school term was improved gradually and was better than that of the control class, so that it achieved number one among sixteen classes in the same grade at the final term examination, compared with number eight before this experiment. The survey and interview with the students also demonstrated the system’s valuable functions for vocabulary acquisition and listening comprehension, and showed the students’ favor to such a kind of syllabus design with the intelligent course management system. The implication of this research is that the blended learning of English class with the individualized vocabulary acquisition and assessment system can improve the students’ performance in vocabulary acquisition and in ordinary test. This system can also be applied in other English classes.     

Designing an adaptive web-based learning system based on students’ cognitive styles identified online

This study developed an adaptive web-based learning system focusing on students’ cognitive styles. The system is composed of a student model and an adaptation model. It collected students’ browsing behaviors to update the student model for unobtrusively identifying student cognitive styles through a multi-layer feed-forward neural network (MLFF). The MLFF was adopted because of its ability on imprecise or incompletely understood data, ability to generalize and learn from specific examples, ability to be quickly updated with extra parameters, and speed in execution making them ideal for real time applications. The system then adaptively recommended learning content presented with a variety of content and interactive components through the adaptation model based on the student cognitive style identified in the student model. The adaptive web interfaces were designed by investigating the relationships between students’ cognitive styles and browsing patterns of content and interactive components. Training of the MLFF and an experiment were conducted to examine the accuracy of identifying students’ cognitive styles during browsing with the proposed MLFF and the impact of the proposed adaptive web-based system on students’ engagement in learning. The training results of the MLFF showed that the proposed system could identify students’ cognitive styles with high accuracy and the temporal effects should be considered while identifying students’ cognitive styles during browsing. Two factors, the acknowledgment of students’ cognitive styles while browsing and the existence of adaptive web interfaces, were used to assign three classes of college freshmen into three groups. The experimental results revealed that the proposed system could have significant impacts on temporal effects on students’ engagement in learning, not only for students with cognitive styles known before browsing, but also for students with cognitive styles identified during browsing. The results provide evidence of the effectiveness of the adaptive web-based learning system with students’ cognitive styles dynamically identified during browsing, thus validating the research purposes of this study.     

Developing and integrating courseware for oral presentations into ESP learning contexts

This study reports on the development of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) multimedia courseware on oral presentations, and its integration into self-study learning and elective courses for students with different English proficiencies, as one solution to problems in ESP courses in Taiwan. The courseware design is based on Mayer’s multimedia learning cognitive theory, and the language learning focus draws on Chapelle’s suggested criteria for development of multimedia CALL. Evaluation of student performance with two different formats for courseware integration is based upon data from pre- and post-tests for preparing speech texts, and a questionnaire survey. The courseware provides authentic materials with a logical situational layout and a friendly interface design for learning ESP for oral presentations in international business and technical settings and offers rich and flexible learning activities with corresponding on-line self-evaluation so that students actively engage in cognitive processing. Students with different English proficiencies have different concerns about giving a presentation. Meanwhile, after students’ self-study for six weeks, regardless of level of proficiency, students’ learning effectiveness and satisfaction with the courseware integration were significantly improved, by qualitative and quantitative analysis. Such students’ improvement suggests success of the courseware design and learning effectiveness with its integration.     

Evaluating background and prior knowledge: A case study on engineering graphics learning

In this work, we analyze the results obtained by a group of freshmen students in a test of prior knowledge on technical drawing carried out before and after attending an introductory course on this subject. The aim of this course was to help students to gain knowledge necessary to take full advantage of the CAD software that is regularly used to teach engineering graphics education in the classroom. Two aspects of the results will be analyzed. First, if this kind of course is good enough to show an improvement in students’ ability. As will be shown, the score obtained by the students improved after attending the course. Second, we have analyzed the results in order to know if the students’ prior knowledge is good enough to allow them coping with their first year. Although the answer to this question depends on many factors, it will be shown that an introductory course is a useful tool to reduce the possible gap between the students’ prior knowledge and the basic knowledge on geometry that should be requested to a first-year engineering student. The kind of test we propose here could also be implemented to test the cognitive abilities of the students.     

Object-oriented design: A goal-driven and pattern-based approach

In recent years, the influences of design patterns on software quality have attracted increasing attention in the area of software engineering, as design patterns encapsulate valuable knowledge to resolve design problems, and more importantly to improve the design quality. One of the key challenges in object-oriented design is how to apply appropriate design patterns during the system development. In this paper, design pattern is analyzed from different perspectives to see how it can facilitate design activities, handle non-functional requirement, solve design problems and resolve design conflicts. Based on the analysis, various kinds of applicability of design patterns are explored and integrated with a goal-driven approach to guiding developers to construct the object-oriented design model in a systematic manner. There are three benefits to the proposed approach: making it easy to meet requirements, helping resolve design conflicts, and facilitating improvement of the design quality.     

面向财务应用的软件设计课程教学模式

为了培养既懂财务又懂软件开发技术的复合型人才,根据金融财务类应用的需要,本文提出了一个面向软件课程设计的教学模型。融合计算机基础理论、软件开发技术、软件工程学原理以及CMM软件过程体系,构建了教学模式框架。该模型具有良好的课程总体结构以及动态适应新技术发展的能力,该模型适合财务类院校软件复合性人才培养的需要。     

An adaptive and innovative question-driven competition-based intelligent tutoring system for learning

ISCARE (Information System for Competition based on pRoblem solving in Education) is a new and innovative intelligent tutoring system that we have designed and implemented. This tool allows the competition among students for improving their learning process in a course. The tool takes some ideas from the Swiss-system widely used in chess and adapts them to the educational area. The competition is based on different tournaments and rounds. In each round, students are assigned in pairs of two, which compete one against another, and each pair receives different questions that students have to solve in a limit of time. Students can see their partial ratings after each round and their final rating after a tournament. A lot of knowledge from different disciplines was used to design, and implement this system, as ISCARE includes different functionality such as the students’ registration into the system, the creation of tournaments, the registration and assignment of students to tournaments, the management of each tournament life cycle (started, in execution, finished, etc.), the addition of the different exercises to tournaments, the calculation of pairs of students for each round with different algorithms, the assignment of exercises per round and pair, the scorings of the students per round and tournament, the management of the students’ ratings, or the visualization of information. This paper presents the ISCARE intelligent tutoring system, describing its different options, menus, or functionality as well as its architecture and the specific modeling to achieve the desired features.     

Competence gaps in software personnel: A multi-organizational study

Today, the innovation and quality of the software industry’s products and services depend to a great extent on the knowledge, ability and talent applied by software engineers. At the same time, human aspects are recognized as one of the main problems associated with software development projects. More specifically, inefficiencies usually come from inadequate verification of software engineers’ competences. Another issue is the lack of an established career for software engineers, which adds difficulties to evaluate competences. With these challenges in mind, this paper presents a study conducted in the software industry to test competence gaps among software practitioners, comparing the 360-degree feedback results and self-evaluations with that of standard competence levels. The results of this research may be very valuable to organizations immersed in software development projects.     

Pattern-based framework for modularized software development and evolution robustness

Context

Software development is now facing much more challenges than ever before due to the intrinsic high complexity and the increasing demands of the quick-service-ready paradigm.

Objective

As the developers are now called for more quality software systems from the industries, there is insufficient guidance from the methodologies and standards of software engineering that can provide assistance to the rapid development of qualified business software.

Method

In this work, we discuss the advantages of the pattern-based software development. We verify the benefits using a pattern-based software framework called OS2F, and a corresponding system design architecture that is intended for the rapid development of web applications.

Results

The objective of the framework/architecture is that, through software patterns, developers should be able to separate the work of system development from the business rules so as to reduce the problems caused by a developer’s lack of business experiences.

Conclusion

Through a suitable pattern-based software framework, the quality of the product can thus be enhanced, software development time and cost decreased, and software evolution robustness improved.     

Collaborative activities enabled by GroupScribbles (GS): An exploratory study of learning effectiveness

This paper describes the findings of an exploratory cycle of a design-based research project and examines the learning effectiveness of collaborative activities that are supported by the GroupScribbles (GS) software technology in two Singapore primary science classrooms. The students had ten weeks of GS-based lessons in science, which were co-designed by teachers and researchers to teach the curriculum by tapping on collaborative work in small groups as well as in the whole class. The results show that the GS classes performed better than non-GS classes as measured by traditional assessments. With GS, students were found to have more opportunities to participate in class discussions, and were exposed to diversified ideas. Analysis of data collected in the classroom as well as data on students’ attitudes and perceptions indicate that GS facilitated students’ collaborative learning, and improved students’ epistemology and attitudes toward science learning.     

Teaching Computational Economics to Graduate Students

The teaching of computational economics to graduate students has mostly been in a single course with a focus on algorithms and computer code. The shortcoming with this approach is that it neglects one of the most important aspects of computational economics—namely model development skills. These skills are the ability to conceptualize the science, engineering and economics of a problem and to convert that understanding first to a mathematical model and then to a computational representation in a software system. Thus we recommend that a two course sequence in computational economics be created for graduate students with the first course focusing on model development skills and the second course on algorithms and the speed and accuracy of computer codes. We believe that a model development course is most helpful to graduate students when it introduces the students to a wide variety of computational models created by past generations and ask them to first make small modification in order to better understand the models, the mathematics and the software. This in turn is followed by encouraging them to make more substantial modifications of the students’ own choosing so as to move the models in directions that permit the students to address current economic problems. We think that the key element of this process is it’s enhancement of the creative abilities of our students.      

A distributed system for learning programming on-line

Several Web-based on-line judges or on-line programming trainers have been developed in order to allow students to train their programming skills. However, their pedagogical functionalities in the learning of programming have not been clearly defined. EduJudge is a project which aims to integrate the “UVA On-line Judge”, an existing on-line programming trainer with an important number of problems and users, into an effective educational environment consisting of the e-learning platform Moodle and the competitive learning tool QUESTOURnament. The result is the EduJudge system which allows teachers to apply different pedagogical approaches using a proven e-learning platform, makes problems easy to search through an effective search engine, and provides an automated evaluation of the solutions submitted to these problems. The final objective is to provide new learning strategies to motivate students and present programming as an easy and attractive challenge. EduJudge has been tried and tested in three algorithms and programming courses in three different Engineering degrees. The students’ motivation and satisfaction levels were analysed alongside the effects of the EduJudge system on students’ academic outcomes. Results indicate that both students and teachers found that among other multiple benefits the EduJudge system facilitates the learning process. Furthermore, the experiment also showed an improvement in students’ academic outcomes. It must be noted that the students’ level of satisfaction did not depend on their computer skills or their gender.