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Poster: Challenge-Based Learning: A Brazilian Case Study
Alan Santos
Afonso Sales
Paulo Fernandes
School of Technology, PUCRS
Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
{alan.santos,afonso.sales,paulo.fernandes}@pucrs.br
Josiane Kroll
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, MB, Canada
josiane.kroll@umanitoba.ca
ABSTRACT
Mobile application development (MAD) has became, or is consid-
ering to be a part of the academic curricula in Computer Science
courses. However, training students on mobile application devel-
opment inherits the challenges of teaching software engineering
where the target computer is a device that has a large number
of features accessible by software. Furthermore, the most related
experience in teaching students reveals diculties in developing
software engineering competencies. In this paper we present re-
sults from a case study conducted in four universities in Brazil. We
have investigated the adoption of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL)
framework and agile practices for training students in software
engineering applied in mobile application development environ-
ments.
CCS CONCEPTS
•Social and professional topics →Software engineering ed-
ucation
;
•Information systems →
Mobile information processing
systems;
KEYWORDS
Challenge-Based Learning, Software Development, Mobile, Agile
Practices, Software Engineering Education.
ACM Reference Format:
Alan Santos, Afonso Sales, Paulo Fernandes, and Josiane Kroll. 2018. Poster:
Challenge-Based Learning: A Brazilian Case Study. In ICSE ’18 Companion:
40th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, May
27-June 3, 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3183440.3195061
1 INTRODUCTION
In spite of the accumulation of knowledge generated in recent
years, the mobile application development (MAD) industry contin-
ues growing over the years. In this direction, the traditional devel-
opment model seems not to be attractive anymore, as long planning
and development cycles result in applications out of date [2].
The development software process transformation in the IT in-
dustry raises new questions that needs to be answered attend to the
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For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).
ICSE ’18 Companion, May 27-June 3, 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden
© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5663-3/18/05.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3183440.3195061
market changes. Therefore, these changes generate a need to reeval-
uate development processes and how to better prepare computer
science students to work in this market [5].
In the academia, software engineering (SE) concepts are usually
teach through theoretical disciplines, with lectures, supplementary
readings, and theoretical exercises that span practical competence
in a limited space of time [
3
]. In this sense, when exposed to the
industry, students nd a scenario in which learned techniques and
methods may be little applied [
6
]. For Beckman et al. [
1
], one of
the ways to increase the quality of teaching is by improving the
teaching and learning processes through innovative didactic and
strategies.
Active learning techniques such as Problem-Based Learning,
Project-Based Learning (PBL) and Challenge-Based Learning (CBL)
engage students and improve their performance positively. This
type of techniques moves students beyond a watchful role in tradi-
tional classes to activities that engage students in real problems [
7
].
In this study, we focus on CBL approach. CBL aims to enable stu-
dents to conduct research by integrating practices with theory and
application of knowledge and skills, such as collaboration, problem
solving and exibility, and taking action in the community context.
Another point that dierentiates CBL from other practices is
that it is eective in learning environments with technology [
4
],
which allows for agility in the learning process as students skills
are obtained through working in real world problems.
In order to contribute to the SE area and help students to improve
their SE skills, this work presents results from a case study that
combines the CBL and agile practices in mobile application devel-
opment (MAD) environments. For this, an approach using CBL and
agile practices was developed to evaluate how this junction might
be adopted in MAD environments.
2 THE CASE STUDY
We conducted a case study in four universities located in the North,
Northeast, Southeast, and South of Brazil. These universities pro-
vide training courses in MAD where students have the opportunity
to develop iOS applications as part of their assignments. The train-
ing course is oered to graduate and undergraduate students and
the only requirement for students is to have basic programming
logic skills. This project is a pioneer initiative in the country and it
is held in a unique learning environment, congured to provide a
variety of work environments.
Each training course has one year duration, with class sizes
ranging from 40 to 100 students organized in dierent teams. The
course is divided into two main phases. The rst phase focuses
on the theoretical basis through workshops and small application
155
2018 ACM/IEEE 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
ICSE ’18 Companion, May 27-June 3, 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden Alan Santos, Afonso Sales, Paulo Fernandes, and Josiane Kroll
projects development, while the second phase focuses on more
robust projects with a bigger application scope. In the second phase
students are allocated to teams where they have six months to
develop their projects.
The course curriculum includes Object Oriented Programming,
User Interface Components, Model View Controller (MVC), data
sources, navigation, animations and frameworks topics. Students
are also trained in CBL and agile practices. Instructors played as
experts for all students groups, overseeing projects and providing
feedback. The size of student teams varies between two and ve
members, since the students are free to choose their own teams.
The course requires 20 hours dedication per week (four hours a
day). The course is facilitated by instructors, which have dierent
levels of industry and academic experience, also it is important
to remark that each university has dierent teachers running the
program. All teachers have previous iOS development training and
CBL training and most of them have some experience with agile
software development.
Universities were selected following convenience criteria. The
data collection consisted of primary sources through interviews.
We conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with students from
dierent teams. Each university provided a facilitator to support
the interviews process and all interviews were transcribed.
3 RESULTS
Our results show the adoption of CBL combined with agile practices
helps in rapidly identifying problems, constant feedback, develop-
ment speed, project organization and transparency, communication,
product delivery, exibility and performance, iterative planning
and continuous improvement, and improve quality.
Agile practices support CBL implementation specially for MAD.
These type of environment is dynamic in terms of constant plat-
form and constant requirements updates, which requires a set of
exible software practices. Since CBL is based on active learning
approaches, agile practices t through the dynamics of exible
software development environments.
We also found that dierent agile practices were adopted by
the participants on the project development, such as: automated
builds (15.62%), using of burndown chart (21.87%), daily meeting
(81.25%), collocation (81.25%), continuous integration (34.37%), Kan-
ban (68.75%), pair programming (46.87%), refactoring (25%), Test
driven development (TDD) (3.1%), small releases (43.75%), and iter-
ative planning (59.37%).
When comparing CBL with traditional teaching methods, par-
ticipants report that it teaches them how to learn. However, the
mentor will help teams to reect where to go. In this sense, mentors
(also instructors) need to have a good knowledge in order to be
able to support dierent students demands.
At the end of the training course, we found that students have
improved their learning, according to their own perception of appli-
cation development and agile development. Using a scale between 0
and 10, in average, students assessment score 2.37 before the course
starts and score 7.76 at the end of the course. This result shows that
students have increased their knowledge, considering a standard
deviation of 2.32 (before training) and 1.36 (after training).
We also identied six recommendations to support this approach.
To do so, we asked the students if they could do something dier-
ently next time, and they pointed the following:
•Promoting team engagement;
•Adoption of version control system early in the process;
•Promote team reections during the learning process;
•Keep focus on the learning process;
•Reduce failure by reducing teams exchange; and
•
Adoption of the right tools and more agile practices to sup-
port the projects learning and execution.
The analyze of student and instructor role has shown that their
roles are more active compared to the traditional teaching ap-
proaches. It happens because instead of students following instruc-
tors content exposure, students need to have attitude, which causes
students engagement on knowledge construction. Due to the fact
that our approach exposes a situation where students have to build
their own knowledge, it increases their engagement. The instructor
focuses more on steering a knowledge path.
4 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this study, we present results of a case study conducted in four
universities located in Brazil. Our study investigated the adoption
of CBL combined with agile practices for training students in MAD
environments.
Our results show that our approach which combines CBL and
agile practices support the learning process in SE. Thus, we con-
clude that our approach can be used as a training approach for
developing mobile applications, teaching agile practices, as well
as SE practices. In addition, the user experience and how students
evaluated their learning at the end of the training course, provide
us a set of recommendations to support our approach.
As future work, we are planning to expand the evaluation of
our approach not limited to MAD environments, but also to other
application development domains. Future studies will look for bet-
ter understand how our approach can improve the learning and
teaching process on other software development environments.
Additionally, we are looking for explore how our approach can help
us to promote a change in the current teaching practices adopted
in classroom.
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