An Environment for Project-Based Collaborative Learning of Software Design Patterns

Software engineering education faces increasing pressure to provide students with those skills required to solve different kinds of software problems both, alone or as a member of a development team. Consequently, one of the main goals of software engineering curriculum is to teach students how to model, design and implement software, as well as how to exploit previous successful experiences and knowledge of others in solving similar problems. These are inherently practical skills and rely on functioning knowledge. To facilitate a learning environment in which students can acquire a necessary level of understanding, it is necessary to apply an active learning paradigm, which recognizes that student activity is critical to the learning process. In this paper, we propose a project-based collaborative learning environment for learning software design patterns that integrates several existing educational systems and tools based on the common ontological foundation. The learning process in the suggested environment is further facilitated and augmented by several context-aware educational services. Our first evaluation demonstrated some promising results for effective teaching and learning of design patterns.