Agile Methods Make It to Non-vocational High Schools

Abstract

AbstractAn increasing number of activities is proposed to students at all school levels to foster programming and computational thinking skills. However, limited effort has been spent so far to facilitate the acquisition of Software Engineering (SE) principles, even if this would foster a set of crucial skills. In particular, Agile methods are a good candidate for the educational context. The endeavor to bring SE principles to non-vocational high schools sets several challenges. For the existing wide range of schools, customized approaches are needed, which leverage different types of activities (e.g., programming or non-programming activities). Moreover, SE should be taught while pursuing the existing curricular objectives during activities that can tap into students’ interests. This work describes and compares different approaches to foster SE principles in diverse types of non-vocational schools. The presented approaches take into account the final curricular objectives; moreover, Agile methods are practically applied and repeated until they become a habit to students. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed approaches through classroom experiences, which show that the participants learned how to organize their activities by applying a SE approach.KeywordsSoftware engineering training and educationEnd-user software engineeringK-12Agile methods