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A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software

Fincher, Sally and Petre, Marian and Tenenberg, Josh and Blaha, Ken and Bouvier, Dennis and Chen, Tzu-Yi and Chinn, Donald and Cooper, Stephen and Eckerdal, Anna and Johnson, Hubert (2004) A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software. In: Korhonen, Ari and Malmi, Lauri, eds. Proceedings of the Fourth Finnish/Baltic Sea Conference on Computer Science Education. Helsinki University of Technology, pp. 20-28. ISBN 951-22-7438-8. (KAR id:14083)

Abstract

This paper reports a multi-national, multi-institutional study to investigate Computer Science students' understanding of software design and software design criteria. Student participants were recruited from two groups: students early in their degree studies and students completing their Bachelor degrees. Computer Science educators were also recruited as a comparison group. The study, including over 300 participants from 21 institutions in 4 countries, aimed to understand characteristics of student-generated software designs, to investigate student recognition of requirement ambiguities, and to elicit students' valuation of key design activities. The results indicate that with experience, students become more aware of ambiguous problem speci?cations and are able to address more of the requirements

in their software designs, that they use fewer textual design notations and more graphical and standardized notations, that they systemically ignore groupings and

interactions among the di?erent parts of their designs, and that students change their valuation of key design activities in response to changes in problem-solving context.

Item Type: Book section
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming,
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Mark Wheadon
Date Deposited: 24 Nov 2008 18:01 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 09:52 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/14083 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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