Combining Agile Practices with Incremental Visual Tasks

Many employers are demanding graduates acquire project experience especially in an agile environment. Final year projects alone cannot equip students adequately unless they have already gained a solid foundation in the underlying principles, technologies and processes. Students should ideally be exposed to Software Engineering (SE) principles from their first programming course. However, the core principles such as agility, extensibility, reusability and maintainability are often too abstract for novice programmers. This paper presents an active learning approach using our visual framework Iteron. Iteron extends our prior work using a visual constructivist approach by allowing SE principles and agile practices to be interspersed with programming constructs such as arrays and methods. Students' feedback on learning outcomes was very positive as they found this approach both engaging and challenging. Performance in the follow-on assignment and the final exam showed a substantial improvement after introducing Iteron. Moreover, a much stronger correlation was noted between individual student performance in the initial assignment and the final exam.