Ciarán O'Leary

Developing a Software Engineering Curriculum for the Emerging Software Industry in China

China currently has one of the worlds fastest growing software industries. However the demand for skilled software engineers is currently outstripping supply. Educational institutes are the primary provider of software engineers. Not only can Chinas educational institutes not meet the demands of software engineers in terms of quantity, the quality of software engineering graduates at the moment is considered insufficient. The need for educational institutes to be more aware of industry requirements for software engineering graduates and to tailor the curriculum and teaching and learning practice to better fulfil these has been recognized as critical to Chinas success. To assist with this the Emersion project was established in 2003 to attempt to exchange knowledge and expertise between the EU and China with the goal of developing an industry-oriented education model for software engineering in China. In this paper, we describe our experiences in developing the curriculum which is at the heart of this model and which is based on published best practice and experience of industry and academia in the EU and China

3D Alignment in the Adaptive Software Engineering Curriculum

The Emersion education model was designed by embracing experience from industry and academia in Ireland, the UK and China. A significant part of the model is a curriculum for an honours degree programme in computer science to be delivered in the Harbin Institute of Technology, China. Elements of the curriculum are strongly aligned in three ways: constructively, horizontally and vertically. Constructive alignment is the well accepted approach to curriculum design which emphasizes that learning, teaching and assessment must be aligned with the learning outcomes of all components of the programme. Horizontal alignment of elements requires the student to transfer problem solving knowledge between domains at the same stage of the programme. Vertical alignment requires that elements are structured to build on foundational knowledge and provide a platform for future elements. When combined, the three dimensions of alignment guide the curriculum development process. Our 3D aligned curriculum demonstrates how components interlink at various layers in a hierarchy to support the development of both the technical and transferable skills required by the software industry in China and elsewhere

Towards Reusable Personas for Everyday Design

Personas are artificial character based representations of user goals, attitudes, motivations and abilities which enable designers to focus their design efforts on key, targeted users. The success of personas in design is due to their capacity to enable designers to empathize with users and understand user goals. Persona development is rooted in the rigorous collection and analysis of data specifically related to the design project being undertaken. New design projects thus require the development of new personas. Since redevelopment is not always achievable attention has turned towards reuse of personas and the underlying data. This paper reports on ongoing research into the development of reusable personas for use by non-expert, everyday designers. Such designers are regularly faced with small scale but diverse design challenges for which they cannot carry out user research and modelling. They can, however, make use of general, reusable personas developed independently of their current design project.

A novel application of Web Services in Computer Science education

Many computer based tools exist which facilitate collaboration among groups of students. The majority of such tools, however, simply serve as communication devices in substitute for face to face communication. This paper describes how computer science students can use their skills to collaborate in a new way. Using Web services to develop interactive content, a group of undergraduate computer science students collaborated to develop solutions for an assessment in an artificial intelligence course. The term Web services describes a new and exciting family of technologies for connecting online programs. Although they are rapidly becoming popular in industrial applications, we feel they have been ignored in educational environments, where they can serve as simple mechanisms for collaborating to develop content. This type of collaboration requires technical skill of a level higher than that of a computer user, but it provides collaborating computer science students with an excellent opportunity to employ the networked computer as an enhanced learning tool, and not simply a communication device

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR A SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS BASED ON COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

A software development process is a mechanism for problem solving to help software developers plan, design and structure the development of software to solve a problem. Without a process to guide the structured evolution of a solution, it is extremely likely that at least some aspect of the resulting software will be omitted or incorrectly implemented. Even though the importance of utilising a software process for solving problems is accepted in the business and academic communities, it is a topic that is addressed very lightly (if at all) in most freshman undergraduate computing courses with most courses focussing on programming procedures rather than the process of how to develop a solution. A consequence of this is that some students go on to develop maladaptive cognitive practices where they rush to implement solutions to problems with little planning. Typically these maladaptive practices involve surface practices such as coding by rote learning and cutting and pasting code from existing projects. Such practices can be very difficult to unlearn and can result in students lacking skills in planning and designing solutions to problems which can persist to graduation. Despite these issues, little active research has been found on the development of software processes aimed at freshman third level learners and consequently there are few approaches available to help freshman students through all stages of the software process. However, there is a wealth of current research into computational thinking (CT) as a mechanism to help solve computational problems. Even though CT is seen as a key practice of computer science, most of the research into CT (as a named area) is aimed at 1st and 2nd level education with CT being a more implicit part of third level computing courses. This suggests that there is an exciting opportunity to explicitly exploit the affordances and skills of CT into a software process aimed at freshman third level learners. This paper presents work which has been carried out as part of an ongoing research project into this issue in which the key skills associated with computational thinking are incorporated into a conceptual framework which will provide a structure for a software process aimed at freshman undergraduate computing students. This research is not tied to any particular programming paradigm but its use is assumed to be in the context of imperative, commercial programming languages. The framework is centred on declarative knowledge (in the form of threshold concepts) and procedural knowledge (in the form of CT skills) scaffolding freshman software development from initial planning through to final solution. The framework known as Computational Analysis and Design Engineered Thinking (CADET) – once operationalised as a software process with an accompanying support tool aims to support the structured development of both software and student self-efficacy in the topic.

Understanding the Everyday Designer in Organisations

This paper builds upon the existing concept of an everyday designer as a non-expert designer who carries out design activities using available resources in a given environment. It does so by examining the design activities undertaken by non-expert, informal, designers in organisations who make use of the formal and informal technology already in use in organisations while designing to direct, influence, change or transform the practices of people in the organisation. These people represent a cohort of designers who are given little attention in the literature on information systems, despite their central role in the formation of practice and enactment of technology in organisations. The paper describes the experiences of 18 everyday designers in an academic setting using three concepts: everyday designer in an organisation, empathy through design and experiencing an awareness gap. These concepts were constructed through the analysis of in-depth interviews with the participants. The paper concludes with a call for tool support for everyday designers in organisations to enable them to better understand the audience for whom they are designing and the role technology plays in the organisation.

The R-CUBE: Reviewing, Reinforcing and Rewarding after SuccessfulModule Completion

Revisiting material previously presented and successfully assessed can lead to much frustration among teaching staff and students. Despite this, it is often a requirement due to the time lag between the point at which a student begins a module and the time when they successfully passed a prerequisite module. Also, students who successfully pass a module fit into a number of categories, from those who were successful in all components of the assessment to those who displayed the minimum level of competence required for satisfaction of the learning outcomes. We introduce a novel instructional model which we predict will be instrumental in assisting our undergraduate Software Engineers who have displayed medium levels of competence in passing practical modules. The R-CUBE recognizes the importance of three dimensions to revisiting material - review, reinforce and reward. Our initial implementation of instruction using the model employs novel teaching and learning methods closely tied to our experience with service learning projects. We expect to fully evaluate the effectiveness of the model when the first students pass through a project that employs it at the end of this academic year.