Conference paper
Teaching design principles in software engineering
ASCILITE
ASCILITE 2004 Conference (Perth, W.A., 05/12/2004–08/12/2004)
2004
Abstract
The teaching of program design skills to novices is a core problem in software engineering education. This paper discusses the need to develop a good understanding of the fundamental computational principles and identifies some of the key design skills that should be developed by students. The paper proposes that a pseudocode based model has some useful properties in enabling these skills to develop through top down design and through progressive refinement. To demonstrate and test these ideas a pseudocode tool, P-Coder, has been developed. This tool provides both graphical and textual elements in an interactive tree structured model. Much of the semantics of a program can be developed graphically before it is necessary to introduce formal programming language syntax. P-Coder also provides capabilities to insert code segments, which, when combined with the visual model, enable complete (Java) programs to be created. P-Coder is not intended to be a production environment, but rather a tool for developing both knowledge of computational concepts and skill in program design. A preliminary evaluation of student results shows a clear improvement and suggests the approach is worth pursuing.
Details
- Title
- Teaching design principles in software engineering
- Authors/Creators
- J. Armarego (Author/Creator)G.G. Roy (Author/Creator)
- Conference
- ASCILITE 2004 Conference (Perth, W.A., 05/12/2004–08/12/2004)
- Publisher
- ASCILITE
- Identifiers
- 991005542137107891
- Copyright
- Copyright (c) 2004 Jocelyn Armarego and Geoffrey G. Roy
- Murdoch Affiliation
- School of Engineering Science
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Conference paper
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