On the Integration of Agile Practices into Teaching: an approach to overcoming teaching and learning challenges of programming
-
- Last edited 15 days ago by Peter Riegler
-
Abstract
In Computer Science Education, teaching of computer programming (CP) for beginners remains one of the greatest challenges. This is due to the nature of first year students characterized by under-preparedness, poor academic background and so on. Moreover, the traditional lecture-based approach is used and the computer laboratories are rarely used. Consequently, students are not motivated, engaged or no active participation. While this teaching approach has failed to achieve learning outcome, incorporating cutting-edge practices like agile methods into the teaching could be valuable. This stems from the widespread in practice and acceptance of agile methods in the software industries today. Though agile practices like pair programming have impacted students' programming projects, none has been reported on teaching. Therefore, this paper proposes a new approach of teaching CP using the agile methods. The goal is to assist beginners acquire needed programming skills, proffer teaching technique that maximizes the chances of engagement, active participation, and improving teaching by reflecting on what has been taught and what the students are learning. Additionally, beginners will be able to operate the computer, write correct code, gain better programming skills and assist teachers to manage large classes effectively. To achieve this, the study adopted the framework for decoding the discipline.
Bibliographic data
Isong, B., Ifeoma, O., & Gasela, N. (2015, December). On the Integration of Agile Practices into Teaching: an approach to overcoming teaching and learning challenges of programming. In 2015 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI) (pp. 264-270). IEEE.