Letizia Jaccheri

A checklist for integrating student empirical studies with research and teaching goals

The use of empirical studies with students in software engineering helps researchers gain insight into new or existing techniques and methods. However, due mainly to concerns of external validity, questions have been raised about the value of these types of studies. The authors of this paper draw on their experiences of conducting a large number of empirical studies in university courses in three countries (Italy, Norway, and the United States) to address this important issue. This paper first identifies the requirements that research and pedagogy place on a valid empirical study with students. This information is then used as the basis for a checklist that provides guidance for researchers and educators when planning and conducting studies in university courses. The goal of this checklist is to help ensure that these studies have as much research and pedagogical value as possible. Finally, an example application of the checklist is provided to illustrate its use.

COTS products characterization

A way to learn about Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products is to define a set of characteristics or attributes and then to collect information about these attributes. In an industrial context, the attributes used to select COTS clearly depend on project specific goals. In our educational context we made an attempt to define general COTS characterization attributes. The resulting framework provides a structure, which facilitate the learning process. Our proposed attributes have several similarities with the generic evaluation attributes defined by ISO 9126. A comparison with such a standard provides a deeper insight into the problem of characterizing COTS products.

Open Source Software: A Source of Possibilities for Software Engineering Education and Empirical Software Engineering

Open source projects are an interesting source for software engineering education and research. By participating in open source projects students can improve their programming and design capabilities. By reflecting on own participation by means of an established research method and plan, masters students can in addition contribute to increase knowledge concerning research questions. In this work we report on a concrete study in the context of the Net- beans open source project. The research method used is a modification of action research.

Software Engineering Students meet Interdisciplinary Project work and Art

Do software engineering students need interdisciplinary skills? Do students learn different things from an interdisciplinary project work than from software development projects? How can a specific interdisciplinary project course be organized? This paper provides reflections about these questions, based on the experience gained through running a project-based interdisciplinary course thrice. This course is part of the master degree education at the NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. Students taking the course work in teams of five, often coming from study programs of quite different disciplines. There is no predefined project assignment, instead the teacher has only described an open-ended theme, within which different student teams then define their own project assignment. The paper provides some reflections and lessons learned that can be exploited for designing similar interdisciplinary team project courses in other universities.

Empirical studies on the Maker Movement, a promising approach to learning: A literature review

Abstract The Maker Movement has gathered much attention recently, and has been one of the fastest-growing topics, due to contemporary technical and infrastructural developments. The maker culture can be described as a philosophy in which individuals or groups of individuals create artifacts that are recreated and assembled using software and/or physical objects. Typical topics of interest in maker culture include engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3D printing, and computer numerical control tools, as well as more traditional activities such as sewing or arts and crafts. Scholars and educators have reported a variety of outcomes from the Maker Movement as an instructional process; however, the lack of a summary of these empirical studies prevents stakeholders from having a clear view of the benefits and challenges of this instructional culture. The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the Maker Movement approach in order to summarize the current findings and guide future studies. Forty-three peer-reviewed articles were collected from a systematic literature search and analyzed based on a categorization of their main elements. The results of this survey show the direction of Maker Movement research during recent years and the most common technologies, subjects, evaluation methods, and pedagogical designs. Suggestions for future research include a further investigation into the benefits of using a specific technological tool and analysis of the Maker Movement approach, particularly in classrooms. These future research efforts will allow us to better indicate which aspects and ingredients of “making” work better for which circumstances and student groups. The findings will ultimately allow us to form best practices and a unified framework for guiding/assisting educators who want to adopt this teaching style.

Using Empirical Studies during Software Courses

A number of empirical studies using students as subjects has been carried out in the last few years. These studies are usually conducted as pilot experiments that allow researchers to fine-tune an experiment before deploying it in an industrial environment. Though one of the issues usually taken into account with these experiments is their external validity, other issues need to be considered, such as the usefulness of these experiments in the context of a software engineering course. This chapter concisely reports on three empirical studies performed at the Universita degli Studi dell’Insubria during the ESERNET project and two other empirical studies that we carried out previously, all with students as subjects, so as to provide the context for a discussion on the research and the educational goals that should be taken into account when carrying out an experiment with students to make it successful from both an empirical and an educational viewpoint. Finally, we provide some advice on how to carry out empirical studies with students based on our experiences.

What motivates children to become creators of digital enriched artifacts

The advent of programming languages for children (i.e., Scratch) combined with accessible programmable hardware platforms (i.e., Arduino) makes it possible for teenagers to engage in creative development of digital enriched artifacts, like robots and interactive installations. But what are the important factors that characterize these development activities? And more specifically, what motivates children to participate in such software and hardware intensive activities? In this paper we present the results of an empirical investigation regarding the key aspects of a creative learning context. The goal is to understand what motivates children to participate in these development activities. In our empirical evaluation, a group of researchers and artists designed, implemented, and evaluated three workshop programs of 66 children total, with the final goal of exploring childrens attitudes software and hardware-intensive activities. The workshops were based on the Reggio Emilia education principles, open source software Scratch and Arduino and were conducted in centers that use recycled materials for creative purposes. For the first phase of the evaluation, qualitative data was collected from 11 interviews and was analyzed using content analysis. For the second phase, we designed a survey grounded in motivational factors for technology. 37 survey responses were collected. For both evaluation phases, photos and observations were recorded and used to triangulate our data. The results showed that: (a) software and hardware intensive activities raise awareness of technology, intensify the experience, and invite students to explore boundaries and increase collaboration and the exchange of views and ideas, and (b) the activitys easiness and usefulness significantly affect childrens intention to participate. These results have implications for those programming languages and hardware platforms for children, as well as for those setting up creative learning frameworks around such technology.

SArt: Towards Innovation at the Intersection of Software Engineering and Art

Computer science and art have been in contact since the 1960s. Our hypothesis is that software engineering can benefit from multidisciplinary research at the intersection with art for the purpose of increasing innovation and creativity. To do so, we have designed and planned a literature review in order to identify the existing knowledge base in this interdisciplinary field. A preliminary analysis of both results of our review and observations of software development projects with artist participation, reveals four main issues. These are software development issues, which include requirement management, tools, development and business models; educational issues, with focus on multidisciplinary education; aesthetics of both code and user interface, and social and cultural implications of software and art. The identified issues and associated literature should help researchers design research projects at the intersection of software engineering and art. Moreover, they should help artists to increase awareness about software engineering methods and tools when conceiving and implementing their software-based artworks.

On the importance of dialogue with industry about software engineering education

This paper is based on the experience gained in several iterations of software engineering courses held by the authors both at universities and in industry. The paper provides some reflections and lessons learned that can be used for designing or reflecting about software engineering education. The main contribution is the definition of five possible roles that industry can play in software engineering education from the point of view of the university teacher.

Happy Girls Engaging with Technology: Assessing Emotions and Engagement Related to Programming Activities

The advent of programming languages for students (i.e., Scratch) combined with accessible programmable hardware platforms (i.e., Arduino) is becoming an emerging practice for computer science education (CSE). Robots and interactive installations are some of the most widespread artifacts for increasing students’ adoption in CSE. But what kind of emotions motivate students to participate in such creative development activities? In this paper we present the results of an empirical investigation regarding the key emotions and their impact on a creative learning context. In our empirical evaluation, a group of researchers and artists designed, implemented, and evaluated three workshop programs. The workshops were based on the Reggio Emilia education principles, open source software Scratch and Arduino and were conducted in creative centers. We designed a survey, based on the main Emotional factors identified from the literature as important on the technology context. Responses from 37 twelve-year-old girls were used to examine the effect of Enjoyment, Happiness and Anxiety on students’ intention to participate on similar creative development activities. Results confirmed the positive effects of Happiness and the negative effect of Anxiety. Moreover, the results indicated that students’ Enjoyment has no relation with students’ intention to re-participate in an activity. The overall outcomes are expected to contribute to design practices and promote the acceptance of creative development activities.