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Several weeks after new first-year students in Computer Science arrived, many lecturers complain that some of their students are not well-equipped with all competences necessary to study successfully. Hence, they struggle. This situation appears at different universities in various countries. Otherwise, there are students in every place, which meet the study requirements rather easily. This paper...
In this paper we present accumulated results from two years of experience with a teaching unit on debugging Java programs. With this special teaching unit, we strive to foster the debugging skills of our students. Students were asked to find different defects in given code, to analyze these and finally to fix them. As well, students were requested to document their approach in writing. The achieved...
The Unified Modeling Language UML is a language for specifying, visualizing and documenting object-oriented systems. UML combines the concepts of OOA/OOD, OMT and OOSE and is intended as a standard in the domain of object-oriented analysis and design. Due to the missing formal, mathematical foundation of UML the syntax and the semantics of a number of UML constructs are not precisely defined. This...
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...
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...
How do lecturers know that their teaching is effective? If they want to formally assess this, they first have to define learning objectives that specify the intended outcome of their teaching, in terms of competencies to be developed in their students. On this basis, they can then design appropriate assessment tools, such as formal exams, that attempt to objectively measure to what extent the aspired...
First-year students are often not well equipped with the base competencies that are a necessary precondition for effectively acquiring complex new knowledge. Among others, these base competencies comprise self-organization, analytical thinking, or communication skills. Shortcomings in these competencies often lead to problems in the study process. To solve these problems, we need to investigate the...
Since unit testing is a skill required of professional software developers, lecturers have to develop this skill in their software engineering students. Therefore, we introduce the approach of “objects first, tests second”, which incorporates unit testing into introductory programming classes. We discuss requirements that teaching materials must meet to effectively support this approach, and present...
Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is an activating teaching method that is highly popular in today's university education systems. In this paper, we use the experience we made using JiTT during two semesters to analyze the effectiveness of this teaching method.
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,...
For us a lecturers, it is important to assess early on in a class whether we effectively reach our students and create the desired teaching outcome. Usually, the major assessment is some kind of exam which takes place at the end of term - and thus at a time when it is generally too late to change anything. Instead, lecturers need a toolset of different feedback and evaluation techniques that provide...
Over the recent years, we experienced that a significant percentage of first-year students shows difficulties in acquiring even introductory software development knowledge, as well as in coping with the study process itself. In most cases, the core problem is not a lack of general intellectual capacity, but rather significant deficiencies in certain base competencies (i.e. self-, practical and cognitive...
Not all incoming students are sufficiently well endowed with those base competencies (such as self organization, analytical thinking or communication skills) that are prerequisite for acquiring complex new knowledge as well as coping with the study process itself. As lecturers, we have to be aware of our incoming students' base competency profile, in order to pick them up where they are and help them...
In our everyday teaching we experience that many first-year students are ill prepared for the demands of an academic study process in technical domains. Usually, the students' problems are not rooted in a lack of intellectual capacity or previously acquired founding expertise in the chosen course of study. Rather, it is the deficiencies in more basic competencies such as practical and cognitive, self...
Zusammenfassung Im Rahmen des Forschungsverbundes Software-Engineering wurden durch Interviews die derzeit bei den Industriepartnern des Forschungsverbundes praktizierten Softwareentwicklungsprozesse erfat. Diese Studie wertet die Ergebnisse der gefhrten Interviews aus und stellt bergreifende Trends und Anforderungen bezglich Prozedefinition, Beschreibungstechniken, Werkzeuguntersttzung, Dokumentation,...
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