LEARNING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: WHEN DO STUDENTS NEED HELP?
Open Access
- Author:
- Eppinger, Benjamin David
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 25, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Steven R. Haynes, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Benjamin Vincent Hanrahan, Committee Member
Fred Fonseca, Committee Member - Keywords:
- software development
learning resources
documentation
problem solving - Abstract:
- There are many challenges that a person faces in their day-to-day lives. These challenges range in difficulty depending on the specific issue they are dealing with at the time. There are a variety of sources in which a person can turn to for help. Some of these sources include peers, online search engines, and books. While there are many resources and ample knowledge of the various types of resources, we do not necessarily know when people decide to use the resources at their disposal. When does a person reach an inflection point to where their mental knowledge-bank switches from using past knowledge to looking for help? Using various learning theories, minimalistic documentation, knowledge bootstrapping, and educational psychology theories, this paper aims to explore this question with a focus on students who are learning software development. In the presented study, middle-level college students were asked about their use of resources for solving development problems. Situations in which the students felt they could not handle the problem on their own included: when group members could not help each other, students found syntactical or configuration errors within their programs that were not trivial to solve, and after searching for information online. The students generally experienced issues when working with an unfamiliar topic, but not when initially starting work on that topic. Conversations, in person with other people, were found to be highly beneficial in working through problems the students experienced. In addition to the study’s findings, future work in this area is discussed.