Abstract
Project-based learning (PBL) is a learning technology praised for its ability to grow domain-specific and domain-general skills and related knowledge and attitudes. However, consistently designing effective PBL experiences is challenging, primarily due to the lack of instructor support and guidance for designing PBL experiences aligned with learning principles. This study designs a framework that aids software engineering instructors in designing, administering, and refining structured PBL experiences. We follow design science research to iteratively understand the problem of effective PBL experiences and design solutions for consistently creating them. We validate our intermediary designs by instantiating PBL experiences for a fourth-year undergraduate course on software design, running the experience, and reflecting on the gathered data. We repeat this process four times. Through the lens of pragmatism, we validate our final design by interviewing five software engineering instructors to examine the applicability of our framework to their courses. The resulting framework is based on the four-component instructional design model, where each instantiated PBL experience is a sequence of learning tasks. The framework is divided into four composite activities to reduce the cost of authoring PBL experiences. The paper includes heuristics and examples to aid instructors in using our framework. The designed framework has successfully created four large-scale PBL experiences, each lasting three months and including teams of 16 students. The case study results and the interviewees’ perceptions indicate that the framework is useful for higher education study programs, coding boot camps, and onboarding corporate training programs.
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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Links to supplementary data that further illustrate the framework’s use are embedded throughout the paper.
Notes
The fourth 4 C/ID component is part-task practice. It defines focused practice opportunities for developing high automation when performing routine task aspects. This component is less relevant in software engineering, as highly repeatable and error-prone manual work is frequently automated using scripts.
Most teams (roughly 50% over four years) started and ended with 16 students. Some had up to 17, while some lost a member or two as the course progressed. The smallest teams ended up with 12 members.
The survey questions varied from year to year as the maturity of our design iteratively grew. For example, the first-year survey was populated with open-ended questions to identify themes in students’ sentiments. We used this insight to produce Likert-scale items for the second year to understand the prevalence of identified issues. We then added questions for prevalent issues and removed questions related to rare issues for the third year. We also had sections of the survey address other research concerns (e.g., teamwork challenges for the paper (Dorić et al., 2023)). Given the heterogeneity of the collected data and iterative improvements, we cannot succinctly present it here.
We use italic in this section to point out activities or objects shown in Fig. 2.
Instructors can traverse multiple levels of abstraction. For example, “modern IDE” is more concrete than “a tool for writing code”, while “a class with multiple fields of a basic type” is more concrete than “a code module with data”.
Examples of supportive and procedural information are found here https://github.com/psw-ftn/supportive-information/tree/d2660e5f13908f30ab135abb3000cf9548784bb6/s1/w1. The content is written in Serbian, but a browser extension can give an imperfect translation to English.
Effective hours were tracked using Toggl, a time management tool.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been supported by the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation (Contract No. 451-03-65/2024-03/200156) and the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad through project “Scientific and Artistic Research Work of Researchers in Teaching and Associate Positions at the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad” (No. 01-3394/1).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Nikola Luburić, Simona Prokić, and Luka Dorić executed the research. Nikola Luburić wrote the manuscript’s first draft and the rest of the authors refined the initial draft to produce the final manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Luburić, N., Slivka, J., Dorić, L. et al. A framework for designing software engineering project-based learning experiences based on the 4 C/ID model. Educ Inf Technol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-024-12882-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-024-12882-x