Summary

The pilot course successful demonstrated that it was both possible and valuable to deliver software engineering training to undergraduate and soon-to-be graduate students at the University of Ghana. The pilot, as expected, also identified several opportunities for improvement in the course content, delivery, and logistical support.

Personnel

US
Carl A. B. Pearson, LCDR, Postdoctoral Researcher, Emerging Pathogens Institute, University of Florida
Dane A. Brown, LT, Professor of the Practice, Electrical and Computer Engineering, US Naval Academy
Thomas J. Hladish, Postdoctoral Researcher, Emerging Pathogens Institute, University of Florida
Ghana
Ferdinand Katsriku, Chair of the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Ghana
Erasmus Achianor, Principle ICT Assistant in Dept. of Computer Science, University of Ghana

Review of Course

The course ran as a series of sessions alternating between software engineering topics and language overviews. The days also included warm-up activities, and coached project work. One session at the end was open for students to request the topic.

The software engineering topics were:

The language topics were

Outcomes / Lessons Learned

The course slides and exercises produced are openly available indefinitely. The material was presented to approximately 20 students (“approximately” addressed later), who formed several project groups. Ultimately, those groups presented their development work on several projects:

The student feedback was uniformly passionate about the course, and overall positive.

The students were very positive about the push to be questioning and the push to find the answers themselves, though they admitted to finding initially very difficult. Faculty at U of Ghana indicated that most education, even at the post-secondary level, is in the lecture-to-rote-recall mode, rather than Socratic-inquiry mode.

The students were positive about the exposure to several programming languages, but noted that more focus would have benefited the project outcomes.

The students noted several challenges with logistics (namely, transportation and housing uncertainty). These challenges made attendance by full project groups spotty, leading to challenges in accomplishing group work.

The students were very positive about instructor availability and interaction, as well as the intensive nature of the course. They found the social events to really encourage interaction outside of class on course material, not just for fun activities.

From the instructor side, we noted that projects suffered substantially from both overly ambitious scope and group attendance. Some of the students had very limited programming background; some overcame that deficiency during the course, but some did not, and that made the engineering topics very difficult for them to appreciate.

Summary Conclusions from Feedback & Observations

Students are, in general, not ready for direct support of the ONR funder’s desired projects as part of this course, or even for coursework tailored toward that direct support. What they need is to have general perspective (e.g., how to work as developer, both independently and as part of a team) motivated by a practical, but introductory project. However, several students were paired with researchers at U. of Ghana after the course and are undertaking projects this coming academic year.

Plan for FY14

All of the original personnel are planning to be available for the course in summer 2014.

We are revamping the course material to de-emphasize the wide diversity of languages (though we plan to keep a session on matching programming to task). We have preliminarily selected Python as the focus language, as it has a small learning curve, straightforwardly motivates all of the engineering topics, and is a common language for initial development in scientific and engineering applications.

We are addressing the logistical issues by identifying on-campus housing and funding for students. We are also going to pre-produce an installation image with all necessary software for the course pre-configured.

We hope to bring US undergraduates this year. We expect those students to generally have a better handle on working independently, and to diffuse that trait to the Ghanaian students. We think the US students will benefit from practical experience with an developing market.

Specific Session Revisions

We plan to revise the language sessions in the following way: