An analysis of software design understanding & motivation of engineering students

Abstract

Software engineering is now a well-recognized discipline in higher education. One challenge of software engineering education is to design teaching activities that empower students motivation and engagement. In this paper we present a study aimed at evaluating the understanding, motivation and perception of students with respect to software design activities. We first describe a project-based course currently taught to second-year students at IMT Atlantique, a French engineering school, and then present a questionnaire-based experiment. We asked the 44 students enrolled to the aforementioned course in the 2021 edition to answer three questionnaires (before and after the design activities and at the end of the course). The objective of this experiment is threefold: 1) evaluate the student's perception of the usefulness of the software design phase and the activity of modeling of software systems; 2) assess the evolution, if any, of this perception along the course; 3) evaluate if our course fosters student engagement. Results show that students are motivated with a good engagement all along the project and the perception of usefulness and pertinence of software design evolves in a slightly positive way.