Experience from using JCSE topics in student projects

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Experience from using JCSE topics in student
projects

• V. Ajanovski, B. Jakimovski
• Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
• Skopje, Macedonia

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Information systems course

• 2h lectures, 1h theoretical exercises, 2h
  practical exercises
• 30 students in the 4th year, divided in 2 groups
• JCSE materials usage
• Only parts of topics, 1-2 slides from each
• Software design models, Structural analysis,
  Object Oriented Analysis, Testing
• The course mainly focuses on UML

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Theory of Programming

• 2h lectures, 1h theoretical exercises
• 30 students in the 4th year, divided in 2 groups
• JCSE materials usage
• Topics were covered on the lectures
• Software design models, Design Phases, Functional
  Analysis, Documents, Structural analysis
• The course is focused on program verification
  (past)

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Student projects

• Gambling shop
• E-testing
• Students' administration OnLine
• Storage warehouse
• Resource management
• Library

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Problems

• Object-oriented software design
• Is it enough just to use the words class and
  object sporadicaly?
• Use-case Function?
• Maybe the hardest concept to grasp for a students
  - inexperienced programmer
• Students are mainly acustomed in creating smaller
  tool-like software packages where everything is
  usually done in a procedure not more than 200
  lines long

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Problems ...

• Class diagram List of classes
• Even though we didn't stop mentioning the
  database E-R diagrams as a typical example,
  students never used them although they had a
  database in their design
• They just create a class named Database with
  methods like
• Save the necessary data to the database
• No correlation among different diagrams

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Experience

• Theory of programming course was given after the
  Information System course
• This had the opposite effect on the students
  they knew some of the design issues but lacked
  the theory
• This course gave them theoretical background of
  the software engineering
• The course was well accepted by the students
  since it gave them an overview of the things they
  knew (partially)

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Conclusion

• We feel there is a definite lack of education in
  the direction of object-oriented design
• It can be solved with larger student projects in
  the 1st and 2nd year of studies
• Introduction of UML in the beginning of the
  curriculum
• Larger case studies
• Where students could spend a month of studying