Abstract:

Graphical User Interfaces, one of the most practical subjects in the Computer Science curricula, presents both opportunities and challenges for student motivation and success. The core of this subject is based on design and coding projects, where students engage with open-source frameworks to develop desktop, mobile and web interfaces. Popular version control systems for software development, such as Subversion and Git, were used for the submission and management of assignments. Despite a high pass rate, dropout rates remain concerning, often attributed to challenges in project completion. To address this issue, various strategies have been implemented throughout the past ten years, including self-assessment rubrics, project segmentation, enforcing weekly schedules and continuous feedback mechanisms. Even though rubrics help students to understand the objectives of the assignment and focus the efforts to maximize the scores, our experience suggests that their impact on the final assessment outcomes is limited. This observation is attributed to students' tendency to overlook or bypass this instructional component. On the contrary, breaking down assignments into smaller tasks and requiring weekly submissions have been really helpful for students since they encourage early and continuous engagement with projects and address issues related to time management and work habits.Thus, this structured approach has contributed to increase the completion rates and, as a consequence, to improve the academic performance. Moreover, several feedback methods were trialed, from informal oral feedback delivered during laboratory sessions, written feedback provided subsequent to a preliminary project submission as well as oral and written feedback following the submission of weekly tasks. Written feedback was provided via two channels on the Git server: issues and pull requests. The former served to report bugs and identify parts that require modifications post-submission, while the later was used to continuously propose improvements in design and code. Notably, weekly written feedback emerged as the most impactful mechanism, as it demonstrated a significant correlation with enhanced project quality and exam scores.

Keywords:

Computer Science, student motivation, student success, assessment, effective feedback.