Abstract:

Unemployment among adults with no or little post sixteen education is high. A lot of people have found it hard to obtain the sort of qualifications that make them employable. In contrast to this the number of opportunities for employment in the IT field and particularly programming remain high. As a result there have been increasing efforts to attract these adults into training for computer programming. One organisation that has been providing such qualifications in the UK is the NCFE. The NCFE Level 3 certificate covers introductory skills in programming and software development. The actual course description is quite detailed and a successful completion of a course in this qualification should mean that the participant had shown the abilities needed for entry level work in the area. But how should they learn? Many difficulties may be faced. The recent pandemic has placed a focus on online learning. As an experienced computer science teacher I was nervous of delivering this material successfully in an online environment. One of the major components of software engineering is to work in teams. How easy would it be for a new learner to engage in this process?

I have had experience with a number of cohorts of these students with varying levels of previous educational experience and knowledge of computing. An Ofsted assessment of the course was surprised that the languages I chose for the teaching included C#. The learning outcomes required that Object Orientation be understood and C# had two advantages for this group. First the Visual Studio Community edition is available for free download and use. This provides a flexible wizard based set of tools for initialising projects making it easier to get a working program going. Another major aspect of the course required that students learn and get involved with software project development. I believed that familiarity with GitHub could be used to teach this. A final focus was on the use of Scrum as an example of modern development practices. Integration of Visual Studio with GitHub made it possible for many of the aspects of software systems development to be practically practised. GitHub also provides free private repositories so that student work could be kept confidential. However, GitHub also allowed the projects to be shared in teams.

In addition, use of XAMPP, a free web development environment that allows realistic emulation on localhost of the various languages needed for web and database development, meant the students could safely practice security issues for web interfaces. The ability to develop JavaScript and PHP interfaces to their databases meant they could also practice the use of interpreted code debugging. This allowed them to compare the process with the more formal Test Driven (and even Unit Test focused) development achieved through Visual Studio.

My approach to teaching software development remains in live demonstration rather than conventional lectures. This provided the students the ability to code along with me and see that it didn't matter if they made mistakes. Another big advantage was the use of screen sharing, which meant groups could develop "mob programming" where each team member could and did share insights and learn from each other.

The most encouraging thing from my perspective was the obvious motivation of the students to learn and the numbers who went on to be successful in job applications. One now even runs their own on line shop!

Keywords:

Adult education, Available professional tools, programming practice, SCRUM.