Abstract:

AIGORA, an innovative educational project held during 2018-2019, started the use of collaborative and open software repositories for programming learning in the context of a first-year course in several engineering degrees of the ETSIDI-UPM. This project used GitHub, a provider of hosting for software development and version control with git, which offers collaboration features such as bug tracking, task management, and wikis. As a result of this project, self-learning and collaborative learning were promoted, and about 150 software projects were developed by more than 300 students distributed in teams of 3-4 people.

Although the overall experience was positive, some weaknesses were detected: a significant number of students did not grasp the functionalities provided by GitHub for programming development; many teams and students remained inactive during most of lifecycle of the project and showed peaks of coding in the last days of development; the performance of some teams was heterogeneous, with a leader carrying out most of the coding.

Built upon this learning experience, AIGORA 2.0 is an evolution focused on project management. During the academic course 2020-2021, each team of students has developed its own-defined software project fulfilling a series of tasks grouped in three main milestones (alpha, beta, and final versions) with separate deadlines.

The performance of the teams and students have been analyzed with the data registered in each team repository (additions and deletions of code, date and author of the modification) and with academic data (team and student grading). Besides, at the end of the course, the students were required to fulfill a survey about the use of GitHub and project management for programming learning.

The analysis of the repository data, academic data, and survey results, and the comparison with the results of the AIGORA 2018-2019 shows that, during this academic course, students have interacted with the repositories more frequently following the project planning. Besides, the tasks have been more homogeneously distributed not leaving the leadership role to a single student. Finally, a direct relationship between what a student contributes to the repository and the grade obtained can be found. In other words, the premise that the more programming, the more learning has proven to be true. However, the downside is that some students do not find the repositories useful and it discourages them from learning programming in general.

Keywords:

Programming learning, project management, online learning, team working.