Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Non-vocational Schools

Ilenia Fronza and Claus Pahl

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Domenicani 3, 39100, Bolzano, Italy

Keywords: Software Engineering Training and Education, End-user Software Engineering, K-12.

Abstract:

Many activities, such as computational thinking courses, are nowadays proposed in K-12 to prepare students

for the current labour market, where being able to creatively use technology to solve problems is becoming

increasingly important, and where more and more people are engaged in programming activities. Thus, there

is a need to equip students with the necessary means to improve software quality, including non-vocational

schools, where the challenge is leveraging existing curricular, non-programming activities to this end. This

work explores the possibility of fostering software engineering principles in non-vocational high schools

through curricular, non-programming activities. We describe two didactic modules and report the results of a

classroom experience (involving 16 high school ﬁrst-year students) that has been carried out to understand the

effectiveness of the proposed approach. During the didactic modules, the participants achieved the objectives

of the curricular activity, and at the same time learned how to organize their work by applying software en-

gineering principles. These results allow us to formulate hypotheses for further work, such as extending our

approach to other activities and observe if and when students will develop a “software engineering mindset”.

1 INTRODUCTION

Computational thinking can be deﬁned as “the

thought processes involved in formulating a problem

and expressing its solution(s) in such a way that a

computer - human or machine - can effectively carry

out” (Wing, 2014). In the last decade, computational

thinking has been recognized as part of the key skills

that must be acquired by all students, regardless of

the degree and course of study (Wing, 2014). As a

consequence, many activities are nowadays proposed

in K-12 to foster computational thinking skills also in

non-vocational schools, where students are generally

less experienced in Science, Technology, Engineering

and Mathematics (STEM).

The broader aim is to prepare students for the cur-

rent labour market, where being able to creatively use

technology to solve problems (rather than being pas-

sive users) is becoming particularly important. At the

same time, outside the educational setting, the num-

ber of “unofﬁcial” software developers is already con-

siderable: the research based on U.S. Bureau of Cen-

sus and Bureau of Labor data shows that there are

about three million professional programmers in the

United States, but over twelve million more people

who say they do programming at work (Scafﬁdi et al.,

2005). Even the term end-user, initially considered as

an antonym of professional developer, encompasses

now a wide range of software-related activities (Bur-

nett and Myers, 2014) and refers also to unqualiﬁed

people who produce software in the labor market.

The downside is the overall low quality of end-

user-produced software (Burnett, 2009). This as-

pect is critical because, even if the errors are non-

catastrophic, their effects can be serious. For exam-

ple, a small-business owner might create a web appli-

cation with the goal of promoting her business; never-

theless, this might result in a loss of revenue and cred-

ibility if, for example, this web application contains

pages that are displayed incorrectly (Burnett, 2009).

According to R. Scheubrein, one of the reasons of the

overall low quality of end-user-produced software is

that most of the end-users lack an explicit training in

software engineering (Scheubrein, 2003).

If computational thinking activities in K-12 will

be successful, in the near future we can expect more

and more people to be engaged in programming activ-

ities, even without a speciﬁc training (Scafﬁdi et al.,

2005) (Fronza et al., 2019). Therefore, in order to in-

crease the quality of end-user-created software, it is

crucial to equip students with the necessary means to

improve software quality. This means that End-User

Software Engineering (EUSE), which aims at bring-

ing the beneﬁts of a Software Engineering (SE) ap-

252

Fronza, I. and Pahl, C.

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Non-vocational Schools.

DOI: 10.5220/0007672702520261

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), pages 252-261

ISBN: 978-989-758-367-4

proach to end-users (Burnett and Myers, 2014), needs

to be introduced also in the K-12 environment. Focus-

ing on undergraduate students might be a good start,

but can not be the ultimate goal when there is a need

to reach all the students before they choose their ca-

reer, which means in K-12–including non-vocational

schools. Moreover, K-12 students can beneﬁt from

learning SE principles also in other ﬁelds: for exam-

ple, being able to ﬁnd a solution incrementally can

be useful in many contexts outside the CS classroom

(Fronza et al., 2019).

The endeavor to bring software engineering prin-

ciples to K-12 sets a number of challenges. For

example, end-users generally do not perceive the

usefulness of learning SE principles, and are fo-

cused exclusively on solving their speciﬁc problem

(Chimalakonda and Nori, 2013). In this respect,

EUSE aims at respecting end-users goals and working

habits, without aiming at transform them into profes-

sional software engineers through ad-hoc courses and

activities (Burnett and Myers, 2014).

Based on these considerations, in this work we de-

scribe two didactic modules that we have designed to

foster SE principles in non-vocational high schools,

by leveraging non-programming activities that are al-

ready present in the curriculum. For this reason, the

modules objectives are the creation of an infographic

and of a video. The proposed activities have been

designed to foster a “software engineering mindset”

without introducing additional lectures on SE. In or-

der to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mod-

ules, we have performed a classroom experience that

involved 16 high school ﬁrst-year students. The re-

sults of this experience show that the proposed mod-

ules allowed the participants both to reach the curricu-

lar objectives and to learn how to organize their activ-

ities by applying a SE approach. These results allow

us to formulate hypotheses for further work, such as

extending our approach to other activities and observe

if students will develop a software engineering mind-

set, even without developing software.

The remaining part of the paper is organized as

follows. Section 2 describes the state of the art of

EUSE in primary and secondary schools; Section 3

describes the rationale of the proposed didactic mod-

ules, and Section 4 details their structure and the as-

sessment strategy. Section 5 describes the classroom

experience, and Section 6 details its results. Section

7 discusses our results and draws conclusions from

this work, also proposing possible directions for fu-

ture work.

2 STATE OF THE ART

According to Mary Shaw, software development

should be treated from an engineering point of

view (which means resolving constraints, consider-

ing users, comparing alternatives, and so on) not only

while teaching to prospective software engineers, but

also to all students who learn software development

(Shaw, 2000). Based on this statement, large attention

has been dedicated to this research topic, and Soft-

ware Engineering and Education have been the focus

of extensive research in the last years, especially at

undergraduate level. This effort has laid down the

recent foundation of the ﬁeld of End-User Software

Engineering, which aims at bringing the beneﬁts of

a Software Engineering (SE) approach to end-users,

i.e., to people who develop software without having a

CS training (Burnett, 2009).

The large number of activities that have been in-

troduced in K-12 to foster coding and computational

thinking skills has somehow shifted M. Shaw’s chal-

lenge to K-12. In this respect, Bollin et al. under-

lined the need and analysed the feasibility of teach-

ing SE principles in K-12. According to the authors,

SE can be a valuable means to exercise a set of skills

that are needed nowadays. These capabilities include:

group dynamics, communication skills, logic, plan-

ning, modelling, and computational thinking as an

ability to solve problems (Bollin et al., 2016).

Nevertheless, only a few End-User Software En-

gineering studies address the problem of teaching

SE in primary and secondary schools. In particu-

lar, most of them explore the possibility of teach-

ing Agile methods, which have been shown to be

a good candidate to organise the software develop-

ment process in K-12 (Fronza et al., 2019). Among

these studies, Meerbaum and Hazzan focused on high

schools and presented a mentoring methodology on

Agile (Meerbaum-Salant and Hazzan, 2010); Kastl

et al. applied Agile methods in class and achieved

greater ﬂexibility in software development projects

(Kastl et al., 2016). In the context of middle schools,

Fronza et al. proposed a framework in which a series

of Agile practices have been adapted to the speciﬁc

context (Fronza et al., 2017).

With this vision at hand, we explored further the

possibility of fostering Software Engineering prin-

ciples in K-12, by focusing on non-vocational high

schools, where the EUSE challenges are ampliﬁed,

because additional lectures on SE would not be per-

ceived as “useful”, especially by those students who

are less experienced in STEM. Therefore, our goal is

exploiting existing curricular, non-programming ac-

tivities, without introducing speciﬁc lessons on SE.

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Non-vocational Schools

253

The rationale behind this choice is that, following the

EUSE guidelines (Burnett and Myers, 2014), we aim

at fostering SE principles by respecting the students’

goals (i.e., we do not shift students’ attention from the

goal of completing their curricular tasks) and without

introducing additional lectures on Software Engineer-

ing.

3 RATIONALE

The endeavor to bring the beneﬁts of a Software En-

gineering (SE) approach to end-users should take into

account end-users’ goals and working style (Burnett,

2009). To this purpose, Agile methods have been

shown to be a good option, because they favor a ﬂexi-

ble, iterative approach, and focus more on the product

than on the production of unnecessary documentation

(Fronza et al., 2019). This approach conforms with

end-users working style, which is preferably oppor-

tunistic and incremental (Burnett and Myers, 2014),

collaborative (Costabile et al., 2008), and proceeds by

trial-and-error phases (Burnett and Myers, 2014).

Nevertheless, the attempts to introduce Agile in

K-12 need to deal with a long waterfall development

model tradition (Kropp and Meier, 2013; Kastl et al.,

2016), which takes into consideration the ﬁnal prod-

uct more than the journey undertaken by the students

to produce it (Stegh

ofer et al., 2016). The introduc-

tion of Agile in K-12 would allow students less ex-

perienced in STEM subjects to focus on the process

side, and learn SE principles also in activities that

do not have software development as main objective.

Therefore, switching to an Agile environment could

lead to an opportunity to introduce SE principles also

in non-vocational schools (Fronza and Zanon, 2015),

thus reaching a larger number of students.

The resulting challenge is understanding how to

leverage existing curricular activities to foster SE

principles, without introducing speciﬁc lessons, i.e.,

without shifting students’ attention from their goal of

completing a curricular task (Fronza and Pahl, 2018).

Thus, our Research Questions are:

• RQ1: Is it possible to leverage non-programming

curricular activities to foster SE principles in non-

vocational high schools?

• RQ2: Is this approach effective?

In order to answer these research questions, in this

work we describe two didactic modules that we have

designed to foster SE principles in non-vocational

high schools. The objectives of the proposed mod-

ules are the creation of an infographic and the creation

of a video. Among all existing curricular activities

that we have analyzed together with a group of school

teachers, we have selected these two topics because

we wanted the modules objectives to be transversal

to many disciplines; this way, the proposed modules

can be easily adapted to different types of schools. To

this end, we also considered the pressing need for vi-

sual communication skills, which is relevant for all

students regardless of the course of study: success-

fully navigating the web requires the ability of ﬁnd-

ing images, analysing them, evaluating them, apply-

ing them to a purpose, and producing them (Conner

and Browne, 2013; Matrix and Hodson, 2014).

Moreover, the current generation of students has

grown up in a “YouTube environment” (Morgan,

2013). Thus, videos and infographics are a good strat-

egy to tap into students’ interests and engage them to

learn also those subjects they are not particularly in-

terested in (Spires et al., 2012). This aspect is par-

ticularly relevant when considering non-vocational

schools (Fronza et al., 2015).

Finally, we do not include software develop-

ment tasks in the proposed modules, so that stu-

dents can focus only on the process side, which

is crucial, as above-mentioned, especially in non-

vocational schools. However, even without requir-

ing programming activities, creating videos and in-

fographics allows us to bring SE principles into the

classroom. Software engineers do not just write pro-

grams: they think in terms of satisfying needs and

solving problems. Moreover, following a (software)

engineering process means managing all the steps

from initial customer inception to the release of the

ﬁnal product. Indeed, SE methodologies (e.g., Agile)

originated outside software in the ﬁrst place.

Among the Agile methodologies, we have

adopted eXtreme Programming (XP), because it pro-

vides a set of lightweight practices to guide the devel-

opment process (Mikre, 2010); moreover, XP is based

on frequent small releases, which provides an oppor-

tunity for formative assessment.

Since in our modules we wanted to focus on the

process aspect, we have selected the set of XP prac-

tices, which are recommended to be adopted together

(Fronza et al., 2019) and map to a set of Agile princi-

ples:

• Incremental development is supported through

small releases, frequent testing, and user stories

as a basis for deciding what functionality should

be included in a system increment. User stories

are implemented as informal prototypes (e.g., sto-

ryboards), which describe requirements in a lan-

guage that is understood both by the team and the

customers. Small releases consist in the decompo-

sition of software development activities in short

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

254

iterations in order to obtain timely and continuous

feedback.

• Customer involvement is supported through the

continuous engagement of the customer for deﬁn-

ing acceptance tests and providing feedback. In

this regard, having the instructor playing the role

of a customer (Stegh

ofer et al., 2016) can also

help in fostering students’ self-organization on

their projects (Kastl et al., 2016).

• Change is embraced through regular system re-

leases to customers and test-ﬁrst development,

refactoring, and continuous integration of new

functionality.

The following section details the structure of the

proposed didactic modules and the assessment strat-

egy.

4 STRUCTURE OF THE

MODULES

The proposed modules cover a total of 28 hours of

curricular activity (14 hours for each module).

4.1 First Module: Creation of an

Infographic

An infographic is a representation of information in a

graphic format designed to make the data easily un-

derstandable at a glance (an example is shown in Fig-

ure 1). In order to reach this goal, an infographic

assignment challenges students to visually commu-

nicate a thesis, supported by citations and statistics

sourced from the literature and the popular press.

Moreover, it requires critical content analysis and ﬁl-

tering skills (Matrix and Hodson, 2014).

As shown in Table 1, this module covers 14 hours

in total and includes the following activities.

4.1.1 Introduction to Infographics

The module begins with an introduction to infograph-

ics: tips are given for creating effective infographics,

such as ﬁnding a clear narrative, visualizing informa-

tion, choosing colors and fonts, and so on. Some ex-

amples are analysed together with students, in order to

check their understanding of the provided tips. Dur-

ing this introductory presentation the focus is kept on

infographics, and no notion is given neither about Ag-

ile methods nor about SE in general.

Figure 1: An example of a student-created infographic.

4.1.2 Creation of a Paper-based Prototype

Students retrieve information on the central topic of

the infographics, and then create a paper-based proto-

type to better organize ideas within the topic. To this

purpose, students need to identify, for example, the

structure of the infographic, the information ﬂow, and

the visualization means (e.g., symbols).

The activity is organised in iterations of twenty

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Non-vocational Schools

255

Table 1: Struture of the ﬁrst module: activities, hours cov-

ered, and XP practices that are fostered by each activity.

Activity Hours Practices

Introduction to in-

fographics

Creation of a paper-

based prototype

6 User stories,

on-site customer,

small releases

Creation of the in-

fographic

4 On-site customer,

small releases,

testing

Presentation in

front of the class

2 User stories, test-

ing

Total 14

minutes, in which the relevant XP practice is user

stories. At the end of each iteration, the current pro-

totype is revised together with teachers. This activ-

ity requires 10 minutes, and fosters the following XP

practices: on-site customer, small releases.

4.1.3 Creation of the Infographic

The infographic is created using Canva

starting from

the paper-based prototype that has been produced dur-

ing the previous phase. As in the previous part, stu-

dents’ work is organised into 20-minute iterations in

order to foster the small releases XP practice. At the

end of each iteration, teachers provide feedback for

10 minutes, which exercises the on-site customer and

testing practices.

Before the last iteration, a peer evaluation model

is also applied: students work in pairs and review

the other’s infographic, so that they can reﬂect on the

feedback received from classmates and ﬁx the info-

graphic accordingly (Matrix and Hodson, 2014) (i.e.,

testing practice).

4.1.4 Presentation in Front of the Class

At the end of the module, each student presents her

infographic in front of the class. The conformance

with the initial requirements and paper-based proto-

type is checked. The relevant XP practices are user

stories and testing. Moreover, this activity provides

an opportunity for peer feedback.

Table 1 provides a summary of the practices that

are fostered by each activity.

4.2 Second Module: Video Production

Creating a video engages the current “YouTube gen-

eration” of students (who frequently use videos to

www.canva.com

communicate and express themselves (Spires et al.,

2012)) to learn also those topics they do not pre-

fer (in our case, STEM in non-vocational schools).

Moreover, it requires students to problem solve, think

critically, and apply knowledge from a content area

(Bell, 2005). Additionally, while creating a video

students need to consider the ethical aspects of mak-

ing a video, which includes asking for copyright per-

mission (when necessary) and giving credit to others

when using their ideas or help (Morgan, 2013). As

shown in Table 2, this module covers 14 hours in total

and includes the following activities.

Table 2: Struture of the second module: activities, hours

covered, and XP practices that are fostered by each activity.

Activity Hours Practices

Introduction to

video making

Creation of a story-

board

4 User stories,

on-site customer,

small releases

Video production 6 On-site customer,

small releases,

testing

Presentation in

front of the class

2 User stories, test-

ing

Total 14

4.2.1 Introduction to Video Making

The module begins with an introduction to the funda-

mentals of video making (e.g., video concept, scenes,

framing, light, etc.). The same as in the infographics

module, the focus is kept on video making, and no

notion is given about software engineering or Agile.

4.2.2 Creation of a Storyboard

In this part of the module, students retrieve informa-

tion about the central topic of the video (for the ﬁrst

2 hours), which is decided by the teacher and is the

same for the entire class. As a requirement, the video

must have a maximum duration of 1.5 minutes (plus

outro). Then, each student starts the pre-production

phase of the video, by thinking about its objective and

idea. This includes deciding the speciﬁc point of view

on the given topic, story, scenes, framing and environ-

ments needed, etc. The design of the video is summa-

rized in a paper-based storyboard.

The activity is organised in iterations of twenty

minutes; at the end of each iteration, the current pro-

totype is revised together with teachers (10 minutes).

Therefore, this part of the module fosters the follow-

ing XP practices: user stories, on-site customer, small

releases.

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

256

4.2.3 Video Production

In order to create the video, students can use a tool

of their choice; the only requirement is using their

mobile phone throughout the entire production phase.

The adoption of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

approach has been chosen in order to “demonstrate

the potential of digital tools and encourage active

and purposeful device use, to help learners over-

come a more passive consumerist use of technology”

(European Commission, 2016). Students work au-

tonomously, but they are allowed to collaborate to

the creation of others’ videos (for example, as actors).

Video shooting can happen also outside school hours.

In order to exercise the small releases, on-site cus-

tomer and testing practices, activities are organised

into 20-minute iterations interleaved with 10-minute

feedback sessions.

4.2.4 Presentation in Front of the Class

At the end of the module, each student shows the

video to the class, and during the presentation the con-

formance with the initial requirements and storyboard

is checked. The relevant XP practices are user stories

and testing.

Table 2 provides a summary of the practices that

are fostered by each activity.

4.3 Assessment Criteria

The two modules described in the ﬁrst part of this sec-

tion show how it is possible to leverage non program-

ming curricular activities in order to foster SE princi-

ples (see RQ1). To answer our resarch question RQ2

we have deﬁned an assessment strategy to evaluate the

effectiveness of the proposed modules. The effective-

ness of the modules depends on the extent to which

they allow students to achieve two objectives. First,

organizing the activity based on SE principle needs

to guarantee the achievement of the curricular objec-

tives. This is essential for the proposed modules to

be successfully incorporated into the curriculum. To

this end, we deﬁned the following three assessment

criteria for the product:

1. technical aspects, i.e., the conformity of the prod-

uct with the desired characteristics, which are

those listed in the modules introduction. For ex-

ample, we checked: fonts and colors in infograph-

ics; length and image quality in videos;

2. narrative, i.e., the product follows a clear and log-

ical line that guides the viewer from an introduc-

tion to a conclusion;

3. data representation, i.e., how visual tools (i.e.,

symbols, charts, framings) have been produced

and used to convey the intended message.

The second component of the modules effective-

ness is their ability to teach how to organize the pro-

posed activities by applying SE principles. Thus, for

this aspect the process side needs to be analysed. In

this case, we limit our assessment to observing stu-

dents’ behaviour. A couple of modules do not al-

low us to assess the development of a “software en-

gineering mindset”, thus through these modules we

collect observations in order to create an assessment

framework for future modules. In order to assess the

learnign of the XP practices, we observed the follow-

ing:

1. small releases: positive assessment is given if stu-

dents organize the activities in order to be able to

present a prototype at the end of each iteration;

2. on-site customer: positive assessment is given if

students take advantage of the teacher’s (i.e., cus-

tomer’s) feedback to improve the product during

the following iteration;

3. testing: positive assessment is given if students

test/check the product frequently;

4. user stories: positive assessment is given if stu-

dents use the paper-based prototype to guide the

production process and, during the ﬁnal presenta-

tion, are able to justify any changes to the initial

prototype.

Maximum 2.5 points are awarded for each crite-

rion and students achieve a sufﬁcient assessment with

6 points.

The following section describes the ﬁrst class-

room experience.

5 CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE

We have performed a classroom experience in a non-

vocational high school in Italy. The curriculum of

this non-vocational high school includes the follow-

ing subjects in the CS area:

• two hours per week of ICT during the ﬁrst two

years, where students learn to evaluate, choose,

and use different tools in order to solve a problem;

• two hours per week of Computer Science from the

third to the ﬁfth year, where basic programming

concepts are taught to support a speciﬁc goal, i.e.,

being able to analyze and interpret data from dif-

ferent sources in order to explain an event.

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Non-vocational Schools

257

According to the classiﬁcation provided by Ye and

Fischer, the students of this type of school can be

compared to those end-users who program with a lan-

guage speciﬁc to their application domain (Ye and

Fischer, 2007); thus there is a clear need to introduce

SE principles into this curriculum.

In our long-term vision, the peculiarity of this high

school will allow us to verify how fostering SE prin-

ciples by focusing only on the process side (which

means, in the ﬁrst two years) can beneﬁt the students

when they start programming (which means from the

third to the ﬁfth year). For this reason, we have in-

volved the ﬁrst-year students (16 students - 11 F, 5

M) in our classroom experience.

One of the authors of this paper has worked along-

side the ICT teacher during the entire school year;

therefore, there was a high degree of interaction of

the researcher with the subjects being studied but, at

the same time, students had low awareness of being

observed for research purposes (Wohlin et al., 2000),

because the researcher was introduced as a teacher.

The two modules have been organized in weekly

blocks of two school hours, and students worked indi-

vidually. Before running the two modules presented

in this paper, we performed a “pilot study” with the

same group of students (plus one student who has

only been attending the school for a short period of

time). In that case, we focused on the process side by

fostering XP practices through the preparation of a set

of slides for a presentation (Fronza and Pahl, 2018).

Together with the school teacher, we chose as a

theme of the two modules non-verbal communication,

which is one of the curricular topics. In particular, in-

fographics focused on gestures, while videos focused

on body language. Students could choose to cover a

speciﬁc aspect within these topics.

Both for infographics and videos, we suggested

to students to produce the necessary material them-

selves (e.g., pictures of gestures, frames, etc.) or to

give credit to others when using their ideas, material,

or help.

6 RESULTS

As detailed in Section 4.3, our assessment included

both product and process aspects. In the following,

we report the results of the assessment of these two

aspects.

6.1 Product Assessment

At the end of the ﬁrst module, all the 16 students pre-

sented an infographic that fulﬁlled the initial require-

ments, i.e., covering an aspect of the theme gestures.

In particular, the following aspects have been tack-

led: 1) examples of the ﬁve types of gestures (i.e.,

emblematic, iconic, metaphoric, affect, and beat), 2)

meaning of a set of gestures, 3) gestures by age, and

4) gestures by country.

According to the assessment criteria detailed in

Section 4.3, 12 infographics resulted to be sufﬁcient

(two of them were excellent), 3 were nearly sufﬁcient,

and 1 infographic was insufﬁcient. Figure 2 shows the

assessment of each criterion.

Figure 2: Product assessment at the end of the ﬁrst module.

At the end of the second module, only 15 students

delivered their video; one student, in fact, moved to

another school and was therefore no longer partici-

pating in the activities.

Within the theme body language, the topics of the

videos can be divided into two main categories: 1)

tutorials about body language, in different situations

and contexts (e.g., a tv show, or two students studying

together), and 2) friendships in which communicat-

ing is difﬁcult and therefore body language is used to

communicate (e.g., two friends who do not speak a

common language, or one mute friend).

According to the assessment criteria detailed in

Section 4.3, 12 products were sufﬁcient, 2 nearly suf-

ﬁcient, and 1 insufﬁcient. Figure 3 shows the assess-

ment of each criterion.

In both modules, we observed a quality improve-

ment of the product throughout the iterations. More-

over, both in their infographics and videos, students

gave credit to others when using their ideas or help,

thus showing an understanding of this ethical aspect.

Altogether, these results indicate the effectiveness

of the two didactic module in allowing the partici-

pants to achieve the curricular objectives (see RQ2).

This means that the proposed approach does not un-

dermine the achievement of the objectives of the dis-

cipline in which the software engineering approach is

introduced.

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

258

Figure 3: Product assessment at the end of the second mod-

ule.

6.2 Process Assessment

Based on the process assessment criteria (described

in Section 4.3), at the end of the ﬁrst module ten stu-

dents obtained a sufﬁcient assessment. At the end of

the second module, this number increased to fourteen.

These students understood that we were not working

with a waterfall approach, and organized their activi-

ties in order to be able to present a prototype at the end

of each iteration to get feedback (i.e., small reseases

practice), which they started to perceive as useful for

reaching their objective (on-site customer practice).

Here it should be noted that, probably, the ﬁrst “pilot

study” (see Section 5) already contributed to training

them on the concept of iterative processes.

Presenting a prototype at the end of each iteration

prompted students to test/control the prototype fre-

quently, so as to avoid making a bad impression (test-

ing practice). For this reason we think that an assess-

ment framework should check the correct “function-

ing” of the solution at each iteration, which is some-

thing we have not kept track formally.

In the second module, we observed an increase

(from 10/16 to 14/15) of the number of students

who started using paper-based prototypes (user sto-

ries practice) as a support during the creation of the

ﬁnal product (an example is shown in Figure 4).

In many cases, students changed their plan respect

to the initial paper-based prototype, for example be-

cause they did not ﬁnd the needed data, or did not

have a sufﬁcient number of actors available. Those

students who at the end got an insufﬁcient assessment

changed the product during the production phase (in

an iterative fashion), but did not update the design

accordingly (in a waterfall fashion), even if they did

have the chance (and were encouraged) to adapt it. As

a result, since they overlooked this aspect, during the

ﬁnal presentation they could not explain to the client

Figure 4: An example of storyboard created during the sec-

ond module.

why the ﬁnal product differed from the promised one.

These results show that students started adopting

a software engineering approach, and managed to or-

ganize their activities in order to be able to present a

prototype at the end of each iteration.

7 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

With the goal of understanding if it is possible

to leverage non-programming curricular activities to

foster Software Engineering (SE) principles in non-

vocational high schools (RQ1), this work described

two didactic modules that have been designed for this

purpose. The modules do not shift the students’ atten-

tion from their main objective (i.e., completing their

curricular tasks) and do not introduce additional SE

lectures. Paying attention to this last characteristic

is particularly important, especially in non-vocational

schools: in these schools, the goal is to foster a SE

mindset that could be fundamental in the future ca-

reer of students, who at the moment would not per-

ceive additional lectures on SE as useful.

The results of the classroom experience reported

in this paper indicate the effectiveness (RQ2) of the

two didactic module in allowing the participants to

achieve the objectives of the discipline in which the

SE approach was introduced; moreover, although

no additional explanations were provided, students

adapted to the new organization of the work process,

by taking advantage of the frequent iterations and of

the obtained feedback.

Further experiments are needed to conﬁrm these

results and to develop a comprehensive assessment

protocol for the process aspect. However, these ﬁnd-

ings can be taken as an indicator of the beneﬁts of

working in the EUSE perspective in different disci-

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Non-vocational Schools

259

plines, including non-STEM ones.

In future modules, we plan to include teamwork

activities, which beneﬁt the most of an XP approach,

and to support them with speciﬁc practices (e.g.,

stand-up meeting). In the long term, our goal is

to verify how fostering SE practices through non-

programming activities (i.e., by focusing only on the

process side) can be beneﬁcial to students when they

start programming.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank all the students and

their teacher for taking part to the classroom experi-

ence described in this paper.

REFERENCES

Bell, A. (2005). Creating digital video in your school. Li-

brary media connection, 24(2):54.

Bollin, A., Pasterk, S., Antonitsch, P., and Sabitzer, B.

(2016). Software engineering in primary and sec-

ondary schools-informatics education is more than

programming. In Software Engineering Education

and Training (CSEET), 2016 IEEE 29th International

Conference on, pages 132–136. IEEE.

Burnett, M. (2009). What is end-user software engineering

and why does it matter? In International Symposium

on End User Development, pages 15–28. Springer.

Burnett, M. M. and Myers, B. A. (2014). Future of end-user

software engineering: beyond the silos. In Proceed-

ings of the on Future of Software Engineering, pages

201–211. ACM.

Chimalakonda, S. and Nori, K. V. (2013). What makes

it hard to teach software engineering to end users?

some directions from adaptive and personalized learn-

ing. In Software Engineering Education and Train-

ing (CSEE&T), 2013 IEEE 26th Conference on, pages

324–328. IEEE.

Conner, M. and Browne, M. (2013). Navigating the

information-scape: information visualization and stu-

dent search. Reference Services Review, 41(1):91–

112.

Costabile, M. F., Mussio, P., Parasiliti Provenza, L., and

Piccinno, A. (2008). End users as unwitting soft-

ware developers. In Proceedings of the 4th Interna-

tional Workshop on End-user Software Engineering,

WEUSE ’08, pages 6–10, New York, NY, USA. ACM.

European Commission (2016). Bring your own device

(byod). Technical report, ET 2020 Working Group on

Digital Skills and Competences, European Commis-

sion.

Fronza, I., El Ioini, N., and Corral, L. (2015). Students want

to create apps: Leveraging computational thinking to

teach mobile software development. In Proceedings of

the 16th Annual Conference on Information Technol-

ogy Education, SIGITE ’15, pages 21–26, New York,

NY, USA. ACM.

Fronza, I., El Ioini, N., Corral, L., and Pahl, C. (2019).

Agile and Lean Concepts for Teaching and Learning,

chapter Bringing the beneﬁts of Agile techniques in-

side the classroom: a practical guide, pages 133–152.

Springer.

Fronza, I., Ioini, N. E., and Corral, L. (2017). Teach-

ing computational thinking using agile software en-

gineering methods: A framework for middle schools.

ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE),

17(4):19.

Fronza, I. and Pahl, C. (2018). End-user software engineer-

ing in K-12 by leveraging existing curricular activi-

ties. In Proceedings of the 13th International Confer-

ence on Software Technologies, ICSOFT 2018, Porto,

Portugal, July 26-28, 2018., pages 283–289.

Fronza, I. and Zanon, P. (2015). Introduction of computa-

tional thinking in a hotel management school [intro-

duzione del computational thinking in un istituto al-

berghiero]. Mondo Digitale, 14(58):28–34.

Kastl, P., Kiesm

uller, U., and Romeike, R. (2016). Start-

ing out with projects: Experiences with agile software

development in high schools. In Proceedings of the

11th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing

Education, pages 60–65. ACM.

Kropp, M. and Meier, A. (2013). Teaching agile software

development at university level: Values, management,

and craftsmanship. In Software Engineering Educa-

tion and Training (CSEE&T), 2013 IEEE 26th Con-

ference on, pages 179–188. IEEE.

Matrix, S. and Hodson, J. (2014). Teaching with infograph-

ics: Practicing new digital competencies and visual

literacies. Journal of pedagogic development, 4(2).

Meerbaum-Salant, O. and Hazzan, O. (2010). An agile

constructionist mentoring methodology for software

projects in the high school. ACM Transactions on

Computing Education, 9(4):n4.

Mikre, F. (2010). The roles of assessment in curricu-

lum practice and enhancement of learning. Ethiopian

Journal of Education and Sciences, 5(2).

Morgan, H. (2013). Technology in the classroom: Creating

videos can lead students to many academic beneﬁts.

Childhood Education, 89(1):51–53.

Scafﬁdi, C., Shaw, M., and Myers, B. (2005). Estimating

the numbers of end users and end user programmers.

In Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing,

2005 IEEE Symposium on, pages 207–214. IEEE.

Scheubrein, R. (2003). Elements of end-user software

engineering. INFORMS Transactions on Education,

4(1):37–47.

Shaw, M. (2000). Software engineering education: a

roadmap. In Proceedings of the Conference on the Fu-

ture of Software Engineering, pages 371–380. ACM.

Spires, H. A., Hervey, L. G., Morris, G., and Stelpﬂug,

C. (2012). Energizing project-based inquiry: Middle-

grade students read, write, and create videos. Journal

of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(6):483–493.

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

260

Stegh

ofer, J.-P., Knauss, E., Al

egroth, E., Hammouda, I.,

Burden, H., and Ericsson, M. (2016). Teaching agile:

addressing the conﬂict between project delivery and

application of agile methods. In Proceedings of the

38th International Conference on Software Engineer-

ing Companion, pages 303–312. ACM.

Wing, J. M. (2014). Computational thinking beneﬁts soci-

ety.

Wohlin, C., Runeson, P., H

ost, M., Ohlsson, M. C., Reg-

nell, B., and Wessl

en, A. (2000). Experimentation in

Software Engineering: An Introduction. Kluwer Aca-

demic Publishers, Norwell, MA, USA.

Ye, Y. and Fischer, G. (2007). Designing for participation in

socio-technical software systems. Universal Access in

Human Computer Interaction. Coping with Diversity,

pages 312–321.

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Non-vocational Schools

261