IVANA NIŽETIĆ Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia Long-lasting teaching materials in spite of changing technology DAAD workshop, Sept, , Durres

Preparing new course materials Bologna process  New courses  New teaching approach (c ontinuous assessment ) Course “Development of Software Applications”  New course – Only small parts of the materials reused from old courses  Professor: Krešimir Fertalj  Assistants: Boris Milašinović, Marija Katić & Ivana Nižetić  6th semester  Academic year 2007/2008: 100 students

Course description 1/2 The aim of the course is to:  Prepare students to develop complex interactive applications, particularly database applications.  Provide a knowledge for successful design, construction and implementation of software systems. Students will be able to :  Formulate the software requirements  Develop, implement and maintain quality software built upon different software architectures.

Development of software applications  Development of interactive, layered applications  Windows, Web and Pocket PC platform  For real users Methodological approach to software lifecycle  UML modelling and program documentation  C# programming Team development  Visual Studio Team System development environment  Team Foundation Server for source version control Course description 2/2

Our goals while preparing materials Choosing an optimal theory to practice ratio Putting emphasis on concepts, not technology Presenting a software project as a living matter Teaching general knowledge instead of educating in narrow-minded way

Choosing an optimal theory to practice ratio Students have to know general professional terms, but they also have to face the real-life problems by themselves! Theory : Practice = 2 : 3 (Optimal ratio?) Theory  “Recognizing” general software engineering terms  Evaluation: tests on computer, parts of homework and exams Practice  Developing applications according to user requirements  Evaluation: exams and homework

Putting emphasis on concepts, not technology Teaching software engineering concepts and programming in parallel  Example: Teaching students only one UML diagram per time, when they really need it Avoiding to make step-by-step course for programming in particular language Avoiding to teach specialities of particular framework or language  Trying to be independent to programming language Using technology as demonstration tool

Presenting a software project as a living matter Presenting concepts in practice Covering real-life problems  Show variety of the examples in order to cover different real- life problem Let students write down and understand user requests  User’s uncertainty and unsystematic  Changing requests, doubts, … Organizing code in order to facilitate maintenance

Teaching general knowledge instead of educating in narrow-minded way Avoiding to teach from a cookbook, leaving a dose of creativity to students  Giving students general suggestions and sharing experience with them, but “force” them to think on their own Preparing student for real-life  Defining tasks leaving creativity to students  Changing user requests  Facing difficulties while working in teams

Conclusion 1/2 What have we actually done?  Let all teams develop the same “big” project during the semester  Organizing the database  Setting project requirements and defining priorities  Defining team rules  Developing application  At the end: the same “user”, the same requirements => different projects!

Conclusion 2/2 What have we actually obtained?  Compare to other Bologna courses, we achieve distribution of points most likely to Gaussian distribution  Feedback from students: “Hard, but very useful course!”

… Thank you for your attention! Questions? IVANA NIŽETIĆ FER, ZAGREB, CROATIA