IVANA NI

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Long-lasting teaching materials in spite of
changing technology

• IVANA NIŽETIC
• Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing,
  University of Zagreb, Croatia

DAAD workshop, Sept, 07-14 2008, Durres
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Preparing new course materials

• Bologna process
• New courses
• New teaching approach (continuous assessment)
• Course Development of Software Applications
• New course Only small parts of the materials
  reused from old courses
• Professor Krešimir Fertalj
• Assistants Boris Milašinovic, Marija Katic
  Ivana Nižetic
• 6th semester
• Academic year 2007/2008 100 students

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Course description 1/2

• The aim of the course is to
• Prepare students to develop complex interactive
  applications, particularly database applications.
  
• Provide a knowledge for successful design,
  construction and implementation of software
  systems.
• Students will be able to
• Formulate the software requirements
• Develop, implement and maintain quality software
  built upon different software architectures.

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Course description 2/2

• Development of software applications
• Development of interactive, layered applications
• Windows, Web and Pocket PC platform
• For real users
• Methodological approach to software lifecycle
• UML modelling and program documentation
• C programming
• Team development
• Visual Studio Team System development environment
  
• Team Foundation Server for source version control
  

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Our goals while preparing materials

• Choosing an optimal theory to practice ratio
• Putting emphasis on concepts, not technology
• Presenting a software project as a living matter
• Teaching general knowledge instead of educating
  in narrow-minded way

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Choosing an optimal theory to practice ratio

• Students have to know general professional terms,
  but they also have to face the real-life problems
  by themselves!
• Theory Practice 2 3 (Optimal ratio?)
• Theory
• Recognizing general software engineering terms
• Evaluation tests on computer, parts of homework
  and exams
• Practice
• Developing applications according to user
  requirements
• Evaluation exams and homework

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Putting emphasis on concepts, not technology

• Teaching software engineering concepts and
  programming in parallel
• Example Teaching students only one UML diagram
  per time, when they really need it
• Avoiding to make step-by-step course for
  programming in particular language
• Avoiding to teach specialities of particular
  framework or language
• Trying to be independent to programming language
• Using technology as demonstration tool

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Presenting a software project as a living matter

• Presenting concepts in practice
• Covering real-life problems
• Show variety of the examples in order to cover
  different real-life problem
• Let students write down and understand user
  requests
• Users uncertainty and unsystematic
• Changing requests, doubts,
• Organizing code in order to facilitate maintenance

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Teaching general knowledge instead of educating
in narrow-minded way

• Avoiding to teach from a cookbook, leaving a dose
  of creativity to students
• Giving students general suggestions and sharing
  experience with them, but force them to think
  on their own
• Preparing student for real-life
• Defining tasks leaving creativity to students
• Changing user requests
• Facing difficulties while working in teams

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Conclusion 1/2

• What have we actually done?
• Let all teams develop the same big project
  during the semester
• Organizing the database
• Setting project requirements and defining
  priorities
• Defining team rules
• Developing application
• At the end the same user, the same
  requirements gt different projects!

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Conclusion 2/2

• What have we actually obtained?
• Compare to other Bologna courses, we achieve
  distribution of points most likely to Gaussian
  distribution
• Feedback from students Hard, but very useful
  course!

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• Thank you for your attention!
• Questions?

IVANA NIŽETIC FER, ZAGREB, CROATIA