An infrastructure for teaching skills for group decision making and problem solving in programming projects

Abstract

In industry, programmers work in groups to design and implement substantial pieces of software. In contrast, most programs that students write in classes are toy programs involving little or no group work. To address this discrepancy, we have developed a software infrastructure that aims to teach group work skills to students in computer science courses and also enables students to tackle larger and more significant projects. We are in the process of deploying this infrastructure in a three course sequence at the University of Colorado: Data Structures - Programming Languages - Compiler Construction.