Software project demonstrations as not only an assessment tool but also a learning tool

ABSTRACT

Software project demonstrations are commonly used as an effective assessment tool in software courses. We found that in addition to helping instructors find out the status of student projects in a short period of time, project demonstrations motivate students and challenge them to synthesize, organize, prioritize, and articulate different aspects of their projects, all of which are important skills of professional software developers. Our experiment shows that project demonstrations are an effective learning tool as well. In this paper, we describe different types of project demonstrations in our experiment, including short, frequent five-minute demonstrations and formal final project demonstrations. This study was conducted in the context of a software engineering capstone project course.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.0 General

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
software engineering education, software project courses