Abstract:

Project-based Learning (PrBL) is a student-centered learning method with extensive methodological support and based on learning by doing by John Dewey (1933). Although PrBL leads the course or part of it through a project, it differs from the simple use of a project as part of the evaluation of a discipline, a usual strategy in different higher education courses. The lack of methodological support on the part of the teacher in the planning, execution, and evaluation of such projects ensures that such learning strategies do not enjoy the benefits widely discussed in the literature on Project-based Learning methodology. This work aims to present an experience report on the use of PrBL in an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) course, with 60 hours in a Computer Networks degree at a Brazilian Higher Education Institution. The teacher taught OOP for eighteen semesters (2011 to 2019), of which in six semesters (2017 to 2019), he applied PrBL methodology, always improving the process based on the feedback received by the students. The planning and evaluation artifacts presented in this work refer to the second semester of 2019, whose class contained 23 students divided into teams with three or four students. The project was launched after the fourth week and lasted until the sixteenth, responsible for 60% of the final grade. Other assessment instruments were an exam at the end of the tenth week, with a weight of 30% and some individual programming exercises with a weight of 10%. During the first month, the teacher used traditional lectures to convey the necessary concepts to start the project (classes, objects, visibility, collections, exceptions, and polymorphism). The students had the autonomy to choose teams and the themes of their projects. Approximately 30% of the classes were dedicated exclusively to the project, considering the orientation sessions. A considerable part of the course syllabus was transmitted and deepened through the development of the project, so the teacher needed some formative assessment strategies to follow up on students. As already mentioned, the orientation sessions greatly enriched the learning process, since the teams presented and shared the progress of the projects, doubts, and discovered frameworks and insights among all. Another formative assessment tool was the Pitch presented in the middle of the project schedule, where the class and the teacher suggested improvements and criticized specific points. Finally, all students individually built a learning diary with at least one publication per week shared with the teacher, and if they wished, with the whole class. The diaries offered the teacher relevant information regarding the monitoring of learning, with information about teamwork, leadership, successes, failures, new content learned, and difficulties. With this instrument, the teacher was able to intervene directly and individually. In the semester that this paper reports, approximately 39% of students achieved a satisfactory level of learning, comparable to traditional learning methods. The other 61% significantly advanced the expected learning results, developing skills in project management, leadership, teamwork, requirements gathering, and mainly engaged in the development of a real and authentic project, advancing the contents far beyond the syllabus. Those conclusions are based on the project’s development and presentations, as well as on the learning diaries.

Keywords:

Project-based Learning, Object-Oriented Programming, Experience Report.