Project-Sized Scaffolding for Software Engineering Courses

Students can often graduate with a degree in computer science without working with legacy code bases, yet when they join the workforce they will almost certainly work on an existing project with thousands, if not millions of lines of existing code. In order to give students a realistic experience without overwhelming them, we added scaffolding to an existing open source project and used it in our third year software engineering course. We asked students to complete a series of 5 tasks, from bug fixing to feature addition, with this scaffolded project. Our scaffolding consisted of enhanced documentation, demonstration videos, compilation videos, enhanced task descriptions, and hints for task completion. After running this course project we collected feedback via a survey (n=87) and a small focus group (n=7). We found that students appreciated the realistic experience, but that they recommend further scaffolding, especially within source code, to better balance between difficulty and learning.