A PROJECT CENTRIC APPROACH TO INCREASE STUDENTS’ INVOLVEMENT IN APPLIED COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES

Many different pedagogical approaches have been used to teach different courses in computing curriculum at undergraduate level. One such methodology is referred to as Project Centric Approach that helps teaching a course with the help of a project, where the students learn the theoretical concepts in the class and practice them in different project deliverables and assignments. Though the very idea of project centric teaching seems promising, however, based on our more than decade teaching experience reveals that, in practice, most of the students do not comply with the concept of deliverables and do not submit their deliverables timely. Instead, they tend to complete their project in the last few days of the semester. This requires adding more structure, influence, and practical aspects to the theoretical and conventional project centric approach so as to ensure students’ involvement in the course.

To this end, this research aims to enrich and enhance project centric approach with the following measures:
(i) define clear project deliverables
(ii) thoroughly align the project deliverables with sequence of instructions in the course outline;
(iii) ensure that all the learning objective are being covered in the project deliverables;
(iv) the concepts that need rigorous attention are also given as individual assignments;
(v) compiling a comprehensive course outline with reference to learning objectives, relevant material, and respective project deliverable;
(vi) define clear rubrics and deadline for each project deliverable.

Furthermore, in order to materialize our enriched project centric teaching approach, we have proposed a comprehensive course outline and project deliverables for an introductory course of Database Management System along with rubrics for every deliverable. Lastly, we have also discussed some initial results of applying this approach to the students, which reflects a positive change in the response of students and quality of results. In future, we intend to extend this work in the following ways:
(i) apply this approach to more courses compliant to the proposed approach, for instance, Software Engineering;
(ii) perform more details analysis of the proposed approach to figure out the improvements in students' involvement;
(iii) enrich the proposed approach by augmenting it with the concepts of gamification and detailed teaching methodology.