VorteX – Enhancing the pedagogy in software development education Mark Ridgway University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK. Email:
[email protected] Mark Ratcliffe, Wayne Ellis Khaydor Ltd, UK. Email:
[email protected]
VorteX is a new product, pedagogically biased in its support for assisting and managing collaborative projects. Currently targeted at a software development environment, a joint venture between Khaydor Ltd and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, VorteX will soon be more generally applicable. Through the use of collaboration, students are able to gain deeper knowledge and understanding of their work. Unfortunately, group projects are notoriously difficult to grade due to the lack of individual accountability. VorteX overcomes this problem by tracking developments of the group work, generating metrics and providing animation facilities to replay the activities undertaken.
Introduction VorteX (Ratcliffe 2003) is a joint research project currently under development between Khaydor Ltd and the Computer Science Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom. Originated by Dr. Mark Ratcliffe, VorteX arose from one primary concern, shared by many academics, that a large number of first year computer science students are failing to grasp the basics of software development. This raises questions about current methods of teaching and identifies an area which can be improved. Problems exist in how we can identify and assist the strugglers.
VorteX The main goals of VorteX are to produce a tool, aimed at novice students, that allows collaborative software development and which also records the design process. The captured designs will be used to populate a case base tool used to provide automated assistance to struggling students. VorteX has three main aims: • The first aim is to provide a collaborative software development tool aimed at CS1 students. This provides a
comfortable environment in which students can gain practical experience of software development, working alongside each other and exchanging ideas. • The second aim is to capture specific information relating to the design process such as who entered/edited what, why, and when. This detailed log is then automatically analyzed to produce various metrics. One example is a pie chart showing each student’s effort in time spent on a group project. There are endless possibilities for tools that can analyze this log producing useful information. Previously such data was not available. • The third aim, where research is still in its early stages, is to use captured designs to populate a case base tool which will be used to provide intelligent, online assistance to struggling students. Currently we are at the stage of a working collaborative product that allows students to work in groups whilst logging all relevant information. Various metrics are available, which allows the instructor to assess the performance and individual contribution of group members (Ellis 2003). Instructors are also given the ability to replay the development process as an animation so that they can see where exactly students are going wrong. After further development by Khaydor, a local software company affiliated with the University, VorteX will be used in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth as a tool to teach software development in Java to first year Computer Science students. Whilst the use of VorteX is currently restricted to Computer Science, it is clear that this has much more widespread applicability and new, more general products are now under development.
REFERENCES Ratcliffe, M.B., Thomas, L.A., Ellis, W. and Thomasson, B. (2003). Collaborative Designs to Assist the Pedagogical Process. The 7th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Macedonia, Greece. Ellis, W., Ratcliffe, M.B., and Thomasson, B. (2003). Promoting Fairer Grading Of Group Based Assessment Using Collaborative IT Tools. 7th International Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) Conference. Loughborough University, UK.
