Learning Modular Programming Using Realistic Scenarios: an Experience Report

• Paulo Santos UERJ
• Jobson Massollar UNIRIO

Resumo

Software Engineering is essentially an applied research field. Students will only understand some of the abstract concepts and principles taught in software engineering courses if they see the intricacies of the real world in practice. Industrial or close-to-real scenarios are increasingly being incorporated into classrooms. It tends to enable the students to appreciate software development as an engineering process in which aspects such as quality must be considered in decision-making. This paper presents an instructional proposal adopted in the Modular Programming course at Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). The proposed instructional design is based on Project-Based Learning theory, mixing group and individual tasks during the software development activities of a software project. It capitalizes on the microservice architectural pattern so that the students work in parallel developing different system modules. Also, to increase the perception of realism by the students, the instructional design employs modern software development tools commonly found in software organizations. Our preliminary results indicate students are more engaged in the course activities, and they feel more technically productive in their jobs. On the other hand, students pointed out some issues such as better accommodating task dependencies in the developed project and facilitating the configuration of software development tools. In conclusion, we believe that our proposal can be used in or adapted to other institutions interested in providing a more realistic experience to students in learning Modular Programming.