Abstract:

Starting a project is a challenging task for anyone, with the level of difficulty varying according to the developer's level of expertise and experience. Students, in particular, struggle with the beginning of projects as it is generally the first time they are applying a specific concept/skill. The lack of experience makes it difficult for students to know where to start, often causing them to flounder at the beginning of project development. The beginning of a project is important as it helps the student to follow steps that will lead them to a solution more effectively, depending on the path taken, students may have more or less difficulty in executing the project. An expert has gone through this process several times and is able to use past experiences in new projects, but novices do not have a well-established background and find it very difficult to transfer knowledge between past experiences. We can also consider that the initial stages of project development are part of the student's learning process.

One of the formats to help students start a project is to suggest steps to be followed, these steps should be contextualized and defined with an increasing degree of difficulty. In this study, we analyze data from two offerings, fall 2022 and fall 2023, in a project carried out in the Computer Engineering course at Insper (Brazil), more specifically in the Embedded Computing discipline where we offer students steps that they can choose to follow or not. The steps are integrated into the students' code repositories, for which we created a tool capable of automatically creating this steps for each students. Through a questionnaire answered by the students (N=42), we know that 88.1\% of the students used the project steps, 7.1\% started the development using the guide but for some reason abandoned it midway, and only 4.8\% decided not to follow the original steps. 92.5\% of the students consider that the steps helped them to proceed with the project development more easily. A mild positive correlation (r = 0.35) was found between higher grades and the likelihood of a using the steps. The correlation is statistically significant with a p-value of 0.025, suggesting that the relationship is not due to random chance.

Keywords:

PBL, project orientation.