Jonas Boustedt

Threshold concepts and threshold skills in computing

Threshold concepts can be used to both organize disciplinary knowledge and explain why students have difficulties at certain points in the curriculum. Threshold concepts transform a students view of the discipline; before being learned, they can block a students progress. In this paper, we propose that in computing, skills, in addition to concepts, can sometimes be thresholds. Some students report finding skills more difficult than concepts. We discuss some computing skills that may be thresholds and compare threshold skills and threshold concepts.

Liminal spaces and learning computing

‘Threshold concepts’ are concepts that, among other things, transform the way a student looks at a discipline. Although the term ‘threshold’ might suggest that the transformation occurs at a specific point in time, an ‘aha’ moment, it seems more common (at least in computing) that a longer time period is required. This time period is referred to as the ‘liminal space’. In this paper, we summarise our findings concerning how computing students experience the liminal space and discuss how this might affect teaching. Most of our findings so far relate to software engineering. As it is likely that similar liminal spaces occur in other engineering disciplines, these findings have relevance across engineering education.

Student transformations: are they computer scientists yet?

We examine the changes in the ways computing students view their field as they learn, as reported by the students themselves in short written biographies. In many ways, these changes result in students thinking and acting more like computer scientists and identifying more with the computing community. Most of the changes are associated with programming and software engineering, rather than theoretical computer science, however.

A methodology for exploring students' experiences and interaction with large-scale software through role-play and phenomenography

Traditional interview methods within qualitative research often capture the purely academic perspective on phenomena. To address this problem, an innovative research method, combining role-playing with phenomenography is proposed. The approach suggested in this paper aims to stimulate participants to widen their perspectives by encouraging them to a deeper engagement with a specific activity, thereby enabling them to re ect actively on their actions and on concepts involved in a specific situated context. In the outlined strategy, the role-playing involved realistic work with large-scale software. This was immediately followed by a debriefing using phenomenographic research interviews when the participants still had the experience fresh in mind. The phenomenographic analysis of the interview transcripts confirmed that the method was successful. The subjects frequently expressed their understanding of theoretical concepts in relation to their experiences from working with the software. The more advanced ways to experience the phenomena was often expressed - and sometimes inspired - by the softwares way to take advantage of the concepts. The specific use of the described method resulted in empirical insights into how students experience object-oriented concepts in software engineering, such as the Java Interface.

Students' different understandings of class diagrams

The software industry needs well-trained software designers and one important aspect of software design is the ability to model software designs visually and understand what visual models represent. However, previous research indicates that software design is a difficult task to many students. This article reports empirical findings from a phenomenographic investigation on how students understand class diagrams, Unified Modeling Language (UML) symbols, and relations to object-oriented (OO) concepts. The informants were 20 Computer Science students from four different universities in Sweden. The results show qualitatively different ways to understand and describe UML class diagrams and the “diamond symbols” representing aggregation and composition. The purpose of class diagrams was understood in a varied way, from describing it as a documentation to a more advanced view related to communication. The descriptions of class diagrams varied from seeing them as a specification of classes to a more advanced view, where they were described to show hierarchic structures of classes and relations. The diamond symbols were seen as “relations” and a more advanced way was seeing the white and the black diamonds as different symbols for aggregation and composition. As a consequence of the results, it is recommended that UML should be adopted in courses. It is briefly indicated how the phenomenographic results in combination with variation theory can be used by teachers to enhance students’ possibilities to reach advanced understanding of phenomena related to UML class diagrams. Moreover, it is recommended that teachers should put more effort in assessing skills in proper usage of the basic symbols and models and students should be provided with opportunities to practise collaborative design, e.g. using whiteboards.

Why Computing Students Learn on Their Own: Motivation for Self-Directed Learning of Computing

In this article, we address the question of why computing students choose to learn computing topics on their own. A better understanding of why some students choose to learn on their own may help us to motivate other students to develop this important skill. In addition, it may help in curriculum design; if we need to leave some topics out of our expanding curriculum, a good choice might be those topics that students readily learn on their own. Based on a thematic analysis of 17 semistructured interviews, we found that computing students’ motivations for self-directed learning fall into four general themes: projects, social and peer interactions, joy of learning, and fear. Under these, we describe several more specific subthemes, illustrated in the words of the students. The project-related and social motivations are quite prominent. Although these motivations appear in the literature, they received greater emphasis from our interviewees. Perhaps most characteristic of computing is the motivation to learn to complete some project, both projects done for fun and projects required for school or work.

Self-directed learning: stories from industry

We report preliminary results from an ongoing investigation of how computing professionals perceive and value self-directed learning, based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with ten computing professionals. The professionals expect that future colleagues will have a well-developed ability to learn on their own. They indicate that professionals use a range of resources, strategies, and collaborators to help them learn. They find their work-related self-directed learning enjoyable, expressing a sense of confidence and pride; yet they often also find it to be a stressful never-ending process.