Experience from using JCSE topics in student projects V. Ajanovski, B. Jakimovski Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Skopje, Macedonia

Information systems course 2h lectures, 1h theoretical exercises, 2h practical exercises 30 students in the 4th year, divided in 2 groups JCSE materials usage –Only parts of topics, 1-2 slides from each –Software design models, Structural analysis, Object Oriented Analysis, Testing –The course mainly focuses on UML

Theory of Programming 2h lectures, 1h theoretical exercises 30 students in the 4th year, divided in 2 groups JCSE materials usage –Topics were covered on the lectures –Software design models, Design Phases, Functional Analysis, Documents, Structural analysis –The course is focused on program verification (past)

Student projects Gambling shop E-testing Students' administration OnLine Storage warehouse Resource management Library

Problems Object-oriented software design –Is it enough just to use the words class and object sporadicaly? Use-case = Function? –Maybe the hardest concept to grasp for a students - inexperienced programmer –Students are mainly acustomed in creating smaller tool-like software packages where everything is usually done in a procedure not more than 200 lines long

Problems... Class diagram = List of classes –Even though we didn't stop mentioning the database E-R diagrams as a typical example, students never used them although they had a database in their design –They just create a class named Database with methods like: Save the necessary data to the database No correlation among different diagrams

Experience Theory of programming course was given after the Information System course This had the opposite effect on the students – they knew some of the design issues but lacked the theory This course gave them theoretical background of the software engineering The course was well accepted by the students since it gave them an overview of the things they knew (partially)

Conclusion We feel there is a definite lack of education in the direction of object- oriented design –It can be solved with larger student projects in the 1st and 2nd year of studies –Introduction of UML in the beginning of the curriculum Larger case studies –Where students could spend a month of studying