Daniela Zehetmeier

Software engineering project simulation in student entry phase of computer scientists-to-be

Many freshmen students of computer science are unaware of the requirements and job profiles of their future professional domain. To provide them with a deeper insight into the requirements of their future jobs at an early point of their studies, we designed a software engineering simulation project that focuses on the main tasks a software engineer has to deal with in professional life. More precisely, this project focuses on the major software-technical, methodological and practical competencies every computer scientist-to-be must acquire. Thus, this introductory software engineering project serves as a kind of “kick off meeting” for freshmen students in computer science. It creates an initial insight into and understanding of the overall interrelation of the different tasks and skills that will be a crucial part both of their study process as well as of their future professional career.

A Concept for an Intelligent Tutoring System to Support Individual Learning Paths in Software Development Courses

Freshmen students of computer science usually are a highly heterogeneous set, especially regarding their initial programming skills, which range from none to professional. As well, students are unequally equipped with essential base competencies, and differ in their respective pace of learning and the amount of practice they need to get new skills under their belt. As a consequence, every student requires an individual learning path to meet his or her specific needs. To ensure an efficient learning progress, it is crucial to select additional exercises for the students’ self-study phases appropriately, so that they really meet the individual student’s current need. Therefore, we developed a concept and implemented a prototype for a tutoring system that supports individual learning paths by providing each student with exercises that specifically address his or her specific needs and take existing skills and competencies into account.

An Action Day for First-Semester Students, fostering Self-Reflection, Networking and many other Skills

Over the years, we observed that students have difficulties when moving from school to university. In order to support our first-semester students, we designed and performed an action day at the beginning of their first semester. This day is designed to create identification with the subject, to get them actively engaged, and to let students get in contact with each other in an unstressed atmosphere. Furthermore, we intend to assess students’ initial level of competences relevant for studying successfully. The first four applications achieved good results. Passive students turned to a more active attitude, as they understood that they are responsible for their academic success right from the beginning. In a survey the majority of students agreed that the action day helped to get in contact with their fellow students. Interviews with lecturers confirmed this statement. Moreover, through the assessments, lecturers get insights into their students’ competences at a very early stage. This helps to adjust the teaching to students’ needs or offer additional support to them. Taken together, we designed an approach that offers our students a better start into their life at our university and we will continue performing this action day.

Integrated development of technical and base competencies: Fostering reflection skills in software engineers to be

The student entry phase is the period of a study process in which fundamental technical and non-technical skills should be acquired. The interrelation of those skills is not only crucial for the study process itself. Rather, the systematic, well-reflected methodological usage of specific technical knowledge is a key element for the future professional career after graduation. Unfortunately, during our last years of teaching we noticed that most of the novices in software engineering are neither well equipped with the necessary soft skills, nor can they handle the key technical skills in an appropriate way at the end of their first semester. Therefore, we designed a project that addresses technical and non-technical competencies in an integrated way. In the project, we induce students to actively increase their awareness of their own proficiency in technical and non-technical skills by guided reflection and feedback processes, both individually as well as in a group.

A concept for interventions that address typical error classes in programming education

Many programming errors that we observe in novice programmers coincide with those that are described in literature. Due to their vast number, it is practically impossible to list all errors explicitly and describe interventions for each specific error. Therefore, to reduce the number of single instances that have to be considered, we developed an error classification scheme that enables us to classify errors into seven classes. These classes are based on the revised Bloom-taxonomy and focus on the underlying problem that causes the observed errors. Based on these classes, we investigate and develop interventions that focus on the underlying problems, thus addressing the problem causes rather than their symptoms. In this paper, we describe both the interventions themselves, and the research process we applied for identifying these interventions.

A Competence Graph to Derive Individual Learning Paths

A heterogeneous group of students starts to study informatics each year. Observations show that students need individual support, to create well educated computer scientists. Unfortunately, this does not scale to large student numbers. My goal is to offer individual guidance to students in an introductory informatics class in a form that amortizes the expertise of lecturers and tutors. To that purpose I am developing a competency graph and a body of tagged practice materials. The practice materials facilitate assessment of a students individual state of competence.