Audience: pre-bachelor students learning software development
Goals: consolidate gained knowledge and leaarn how to apply it in practice. Improve soft skills needed while building tech career.
Project length: 1 academic year
Mentors: University professors with practical experience (working in software development company)
Learning Scenario
4th year sturents specializing in software development, who are about to get their bachelor degree, have knowledge in different areas – software design, front-end-development, back-end development.
The idea of the project is give them understanding how this knowledge works in real life being applied to software development in modern IT compaunies.
How it works:
At the beginning of the project students should be divided into groups consisting of 4-5 people in each group.
Mentor fulfills short assessment in a form of questionnarie to understand background and skills of each student. Based on answers such roles are assigned:
- Designer and/or Front-end developer
- Back-end developer
- Full-stack developer
- Tester
- Project manager
The group should include students of the roles, that cover all software life cycle, for example “Project manager + designer + full-stack developer + tester” or “Project manager + front-end developer + back-end developer + tester“.
Then each group selects a topic – a software they’re going to develop.
The project is split into small one week long steps:
- select topic
- select stack of technologies
- write user stories or specification
- prepare wireframes and architecture
- develop core
- develop features
- perform quality assurance
- prepare presentation
Mentor doesn’t actively interfere into the process, however he’s in touch all the time, following the discussions within groups and suggesting advice or correction if on his opinion something can be improved. In a real project such behavior can be considered as “product owner” or a customer representer.
At the end of the course each group presents their project to others. They need to show at least proof of concept of MVP (Minimal Viable Product), describe development methodology they used, highlight steps and timeline.
Learning theories:
Project-based learning gives the learners problems to solve through a project instead of focusing on abstractions and memorization.
Behaviorism:
Stimuli – During work career their positive stimuli will be salary. During learning project their salary is high grades.
Constructivism:
Each student is being assessed beforehand to estimate his background and give him proper role.
Soft scaffolding – mentor is in touch every time to make process corrections.
Sharing knowledge in group increases knowledge of each individual.
Cognitivism:
Reach goal in small steps – process split into short stages easy to fulfill.
Each next step is based on previous steps, stimulating flow of information between working and long-term memory.
Andragogy:
Practical knowledge – bachelor students are almost ready for their career. Some of them alerady signed contracts with tech companies or are about to sign them. They are incintrically motivated to gain more practical knowledge rather than theoretical one.
Gamification – like children playing dolls or briks to reproduce future scenarios of adult life, students are playng “developers” to get prepared to possible scenarios in their future career.