Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Middle Schools by

Combining Robotics and Blogging

Ilenia Fronza

, Claus Pahl

and Boris Su

sanj

Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, Piazza Domenicani 3, 39100 Bolzano, Italy

Keywords:

Software Engineering, End-user Software Engineering, Computational Thinking, K-12.

Abstract:

In the current labor market, a large number of people engage in programming activities, even without being

trained developers. Fostering Software Engineering (SE) principles at the K-12 level can increase the quality

of the code that students will write in their future careers. Middle school students usually learn Computer

Science (CS) as part of other disciplines; thus, the challenge is achieving the CS learning objectives and foster

SE principles while fulﬁlling the curricular objectives. In this work, we describe a didactic module and its

assessment framework; moreover, we report the results of a classroom experience that shows the effectiveness

of the proposed approach. This work provides educators with a practical example of how to cover several

areas of technology in a way for middle school students to be engaged and to spark future interest. The results

encourage us to work on the development of the next modules dedicated to middle schools.

1 INTRODUCTION

The number of unqualiﬁed people (i.e., end-users)

who produce software in the labor market is consid-

erable (Burnett and Myers, 2014) and includes secre-

taries, accountants, teachers, or anyone else who ﬁnds

themselves writing programs to support their work

(Ko et al., 2011). In 2015, among 26 million U.S. on-

line job postings, there were as many as 7 million job

openings in occupations that valued coding as a tech-

nical skill (Burning Glass Technologies, 2016). In

2017, Gartner Inc. predicted that by 2022, citizen de-

velopers (i.e., non-professional developers who build

applications for use by other people) would be build-

ing more than a third of all web/mobile employee-

facing apps delivered in organizations with mature

citizen development initiatives (Gartner Inc., 2017).

One of the well-known issues of end-user-

produced software is its overall low quality (Burnett,

2009), which is mainly explained by the lack of Soft-

ware Engineering (SE) training (Scheubrein, 2003).

To address this issue, End-User Software Engineer-

ing (EUSE) provides end-users with the knowledge of

basic SE principles (Barricelli et al., 2019). A limited

effort has been spent so far to facilitate the acquisition

of software quality notions and SE principles (Mon-

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0224-2452

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9049-212X

teiro et al., 2017). In particular, there is a need to

focus on middle schools to reach the highest number

of students before they choose their careers. This en-

deavor sets several challenges. For example, the goal

is not turning students into professional software en-

gineers through ad-hoc activities (Burnett and Myers,

2014). Indeed, middle school students, in general, do

not perceive the usefulness of SE principles. More-

over, in many contexts (including the one considered

in this work) Computer Science (CS) is taught as part

of other disciplines, which hinders the reservation of

time for content that does not directly contribute to

achieving the curricular objectives.

Based on these considerations, we propose a di-

dactic module (for ﬁrst-year middle school) that aims

at achieving the CS learning objectives (through ed-

ucational robotics) and foster SE principles, while

guaranteeing the achievement of the curricular objec-

tives. The proposed activities (and assessment frame-

work) have been designed based on the learning ob-

jectives listed in a recent proposal of a core informat-

ics curriculum (Forlizzi et al., 2018). To evaluate the

effectiveness of the proposed module, we performed a

classroom experience involving 11 students. The re-

sults show the effectiveness of the proposed module

and encourage us to work on the development of the

next modules for middle schools.

The remaining part of the paper is organized as

follows. Section 2 describes the state of the art of

350

Fronza, I., Pahl, C. and Sušanj, B.

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Middle Schools by Combining Robotics and Blogging.

DOI: 10.5220/0009341303500357

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2020) - Volume 1, pages 350-357

ISBN: 978-989-758-417-6

EUSE in K-12; Section 3 describes the rationale of

the proposed module, and Section 4 details its struc-

ture and assessment framework. Section 5 describes

the classroom experience, and Section 6 reports its re-

sults. Section 7 discusses our results and draws con-

clusions from this work, also proposing possible di-

rections for future work.

2 STATE OF THE ART

In the last two decades, researchers proposed several

approaches to support end-users in modifying or cre-

ating software artifacts to solve their professional or

personal problems (Barricelli et al., 2019). In par-

ticular, the ﬁelds of End-User Programming (EUP),

End-User Development (EUD), and End-User Soft-

ware Engineering (EUSE) have been very active in

this direction (Barricelli et al., 2019). In particular,

EUSE focuses on systematic and disciplined activi-

ties to improve the quality of end-user-produced code

(Barricelli et al., 2019; Burnett and Myers, 2014).

The large number of activities fostering coding

and computational thinking at different levels of ed-

ucation contribute to increasing the number of end-

users. Some students will pursue a CS career; many

of them will write some code to support their work.

Thus, there is a need to reach all the students before

they choose their careers. Indeed, in 2000, M. Shaw

indicated the need for treating software development

from an engineering point of view to all students who

learn software development, and not only to prospec-

tive software engineers (Shaw, 2000). Bollin et al. in-

dicated SE as a valuable means to start exercising, at

the K-12 level, a set of skills that are valuable in the

labor market (Bollin et al., 2016). Rico and Sayani

recommended introducing Agile methods as early as

possible (Rico and Sayani, 2009). Few EUSE studies

focus on K-12, where Agile methods are an excellent

candidate (Fronza et al., 2019a). The existing studies

focused on proposing a mentoring methodology on

Agile (Meerbaum-Salant and Hazzan, 2010), achiev-

ing greater ﬂexibility in development projects using

Agile (Kastl et al., 2016), and understanding how

to foster Agile in different contexts, including non-

vocational (Fronza and Zanon, 2015; Fronza et al.,

2016) and middle schools (Fronza et al., 2017). With

this vision at hand, we explored further the possibil-

ity of fostering Agile principles in middle schools,

while pursuing CS and curricular learning objectives.

Following the EUSE guidelines (Burnett and Myers,

2014), we avoid introducing additional lectures on the

topic.

3 RATIONALE

In the last years, a range of activities has been pro-

posed to foster programming skills at different lev-

els of education (Bocconi et al., 2016). Neverthe-

less, limited effort has been spent to explore the pos-

sibility of facilitating the acquisition of software qual-

ity notions and Software Engineering (SE) principles

(Monteiro et al., 2017; Fronza et al., 2017).

In this work, we focus on middle schools to reach

the highest number of students before they choose

their future careers. Middle school students, includ-

ing those considered in this work, usually learn CS

as part of other disciplines. Therefore, the challenge

is achieving the CS learning objectives and foster SE

principles while also fulﬁlling the curricular learning

objectives. Our long-term goal is providing schools

with a set of progressive modules for this purpose.

Our Research Questions are:

RQ1: Is it possible, in ﬁrst-year middle school, to

achieve CS learning objectives and foster SE

principles, while fulﬁlling the existing curric-

ular learning objectives?

RQ2: Is this approach effective?

We describe a ﬁrst-year module that we have de-

signed for this purpose. The module comprises a

robotics project combined with an existing curricu-

lar activity, which is blogging. Together with a group

of school teachers, we selected blogging to achieve

the following curricular objectives: 1) create simple

websites or blogs, 2) access the Internet with conﬁ-

dence, and 3) respect the copyright rules. Moreover,

blogging is transversal to many disciplines (e.g., Lan-

guages); thus, it provides an example to students of

their potential to use technology in any professional

path of their choice. Blogging also taps into students’

interests and engages them to learn the technical part,

even if they are not particularly interested in it (Spires

et al., 2012). Finally, this choice allows us to pro-

mote a competent/responsible use of devices through

a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy by using

smartphones to collect material for the blog.

We aim at providing students with the ﬁrst expe-

rience of the entire SE process, from initial customer

inception to product release. Therefore, our module

consists in a didactic transposition (i.e., the process

by which professional content (scientist, scholar, or

expert knowledge) becomes school content, by adapt-

ing and shaping the professional knowledge to ﬁt the

school environment (Chevallard and Gilman, 1991;

Hazzan et al., 2010)) of eXtreme Programming (XP).

This approach ﬁts the EUSE goal, which is foster-

ing SE principles without turning students into pro-

fessional software engineers (Burnett, 2009).

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Middle Schools by Combining Robotics and Blogging

351

When teaching SE to undergraduates, it is essen-

tial to apply suitable practices according to students’

goals instead of fulﬁlling the complete implemen-

tation of methods (Schneider and Johnston, 2005).

Since teaching to even younger students, we followed

this advice and selected a set of XP practices, which

correspond to a set of Agile principles and are recom-

mended to be adopted together (Fronza et al., 2019a;

Kastl et al., 2016):

• incremental development, through small releases,

frequent testing, and user stories;

• customer involvement, by having the instructor

playing this role;

• change, through regular system releases, test-ﬁrst,

refactoring, and continuous integration.

We limited the difﬁculty of the programming task

to let students focus more on the SE process (Fronza

and Pahl, 2019). The triviality of the programming

task supports our goal of starting a progressive set of

activities, during which the didactic transposition of

the Agile methods becomes closer and closer to the

professional setting, also by increasing the difﬁculty

of the programming task.

4 STRUCTURE OF THE MODULE

The proposed didactic module consists of the follow-

ing four parts and covers a total of 20 hours, spread

over ten weeks by having two hours per week:

1. introduction and team creation (4 hours);

2. blogs: introduction, Wordpress tutorial, ﬁrst posts

(6 hours);

3. unplugged introduction to robotics (4 hours);

4. robotics project (6 hours).

Module and assessment framework have been de-

signed based on the learning objectives listed in a re-

cent proposal of a core informatics curriculum (Forl-

izzi et al., 2018). Since we aimed at creating a pro-

gression of activities for middle schools, for the ﬁrst

year we selected from this proposal a subset of objec-

tives of four areas (Table 1). Moreover, based on our

research questions, we deﬁned the Area of SE.

For assessment, under consideration of the un-

derlying principles of Project-Based Learning (PBL)

(Romeike and G

ottel, 2012), we did not hand out

tests, and we preferred critique and revision, sup-

ported by observation, interview, and code inspec-

tions (Fronza et al., 2017).

4.1 Introduction and Team Creation

We distribute a questionnaire to collect data about par-

ticipants’ backgrounds and habits; then, we open a

discussion on the topic “what is a robot?”, by show-

ing pictures of different robots (e.g., humanoid and

grass-cutter). Afterward, teams are formed. Work-

ing in teams is an essential task to master for soft-

ware engineers (Zucconi, 1995), as it allows to ex-

change experiences and brings powerful opportunities

for personal development. In particular, Agile teaches

us that good products come from good teams (Mar-

tin, 2003). However, being part of an ineffective team

may lead to extreme frustration and resentment (Oak-

ley et al., 2004). Thus, we take the following steps

to facilitate team building (Oakley et al., 2004): 1)

instructors form teams, based on their knowledge of

students’ characteristics, trying to form teams whose

members are diverse in ability level; 2) teams agree

on a team name and logo.

4.2 Blogs: Introduction, Wordpress

Tutorial, First Posts

We provide basic notions on the following topics:

• Basic architectural and functional concepts of the

Internet and the Web.

• Basic architectural and functional concepts of

computer-based systems and devices distinguish-

ing between hardware and software.

• Copyright issues when publishing on-

line, with Google Image Search (https:

//images.google.com) as an example to retrieve

Creative Commons-licensed photos.

• Internet safety and the importance of protecting a

blog by using a password and avoiding the publi-

cation of personal information.

Afterward, each team ﬁnds a blog online and de-

scribes it to the others. Each presentation is used

to ﬁnd some common characteristics of blogs. Fi-

nally, we provide a tutorial on Wordpress (https://

en.wordpress.com). Table 2 details the assessment

framework.

4.3 Unplugged Introduction to Robotics

During this part, participants work on unplugged ac-

tivities, which get documented in the blog. Table 3

shows the assessment framework.

Coding Game (http://bit.ly/2XqiQTl). Four groups

compete in a board game to reach speciﬁc points of

the board, which requires to decide shared conven-

tions for directions.

CSEDU 2020 - 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

352

Table 1: Learning Objectives (Forlizzi et al., 2018) and Parts of the Module in Which They Are Pursued.

Area of Algorithms

id Knowledge and skills P2 P3 P4

A1 To detect the potential ambiguities hidden in the description of an algorithm when

natural language is used

A2 To describe an algorithm according to the capabilities of the automatic executors

A3 To write algorithms, even based on conventional notations, to describe simple pro-

cesses inspired from the everyday life

A4 To detect/describe the conditions under which a process may terminate

Area of Programming

P1 To try small/simple changes in a program to understand and modify its behavior,

identify and ﬁx its ﬂaws

P2 To write programs that use selections

P3 To trace the progress of computation

Area of Digital Awareness

DA1 To understand the main architectural/functional concepts of the Internet and the Web

DA2 To understand the main architectural/functional concepts of computer-based systems

and devices, distinguishing between hardware and software

DA3 To connect computer-based devices with each other and with peripheral devices

DA4 To recognize the value of personal data (not only sensitive data) and be aware of

issues related to identity on the network

Area of Digital Creativity

DC1 To experiment during the creation of digital content various digital tools and multiple

processing methods, so as to express themselves at their best

DC2 To choose the most appropriate digital tools for their expressive goals

DC3 To select and organize digital content for an effective presentation

Area of Software Engineering

SE1 To develop the solution in smaller portions at a time (i.e., incremental development)

SE2 To take advantage of a customer’s feedback (i.e., customer involvement)

SE3 To be able to manage changes to requirements (i.e., change)

Table 2: Assessment in Part 2 (Ids Are Deﬁned in Table 1).

id Assessment criteria

DA1 Ability to summarize in the blog the main

architectural and functional concepts of the

Internet and the Web

DA2 Ability to summarize in the blog the

main architectural/functional concepts of

computer-based systems and devices dis-

tinguishing hardware and software

DA3 Ability to connect a robot/mobile phone

via USB to the PC

DA4 Ability to ask relevant questions while us-

ing the Web, and basic awareness of some

risks related to it

Tell Me How You Make Toast (http://bit.ly/

2V9kKK7). Each student sketches a diagram of how

to make toast, one step per post-it. Then, the solutions

are combined in one single solution. The take-away

message is about the importance of working together

and identifying small steps to solve a problem.

4.4 Robotics Project

After providing each team with a robot and

a laptop, we introduce the programming en-

vironment (Studuino: https://www.artec-kk.co.jp/

studuino/). Afterward, under consideration of the

PBL principles, the same challenge is given to all the

teams: build a robot that can draw the boundary lines

of a football ﬁeld. We chose this challenge for two

main reasons: 1) geometric ﬁgures are a topic of ﬁrst-

year middle school; and 2) it does not require to use

lights, sound, or sensors, which keeps the program-

ming task to a basic level by avoiding conditions and

input management. The modularity of the robot sup-

ports this choice, i.e., participants build an elementary

robot that does not include sensors.

Teams write on a post-it each step to achieve

the goal, and solve each task (e.g., “let the robot

move forward”) during one iteration; when one step

is complete, each team can show the current version

(i.e., small releases) to the customer to get feedback.

Teams are encouraged to frequently test and complete

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Middle Schools by Combining Robotics and Blogging

353

Table 3: Assessment in Part 3 (Ids Are Deﬁned in Table 1).

id Assessment criteria

A1 Ability to deﬁne/follow a common set of

conventions during the coding game, and

to ask for clariﬁcation when some instruc-

tions are ambiguous

A2 Ability to adapt the description of an algo-

rithm depending on the executor (i.e., peers

during the coding game and the Tell Me

How You Make Toast activity)

A3 Ability to deﬁne an algorithm to solve a

real life example (i.e., preparing a toast)

A4 To describe the conditions to terminate the

processes of the coding game and of the

preparation of a toast

DC1 Ability to add effects to pictures when

needed, and to write texts for the blog us-

ing various fonts and colors

DC2 Ability to identify the correct tool for each

activity (e.g., writing, coding, etc.)

DC3 Overall quality of the blog

SE3 Ability to integrate changes to the solution

a task before starting the next one. At the beginning

(and end) of each meeting, teams have a 5-minute

stand-up meeting to recap: what have we done so far?

What are we going to do today (next time)? Besides

supporting the SE process (Section 3), these meetings

serve to collect data for the blog, which is also done

during the iterations by using smartphones (i.e., pic-

tures, videos, short notes). Table 4 illustrates the as-

sessment framework.

5 CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE

We performed a classroom experience involving 11

middle school students (7 M and 4 F); German was

the mother-tongue of four students, and Italian of

the other seven. The school teacher formed three

teams (two teams of four and one of three students)

and one/two German mother-tongue speakers were

assigned to each team. The activities could be docu-

mented either in German or Italian, to make this mod-

ule transversal to Languages.

Ten students (7 M and 3 F) completed the ini-

tial questionnaire. According to their answers, nine

of them own both a computer and a smartphone, and

seven use computers more frequently, mostly for in-

ternet browsing (eight respondents), writing text and

preparing presentations (six), and listening to music

(four). Smartphones are mostly used for listening to

music (ten), internet browsing (ten), playing (eight),

social networks/chats (seven). In most of the cases

Table 4: Assessment in Part 4 (Ids Are Deﬁned in Table 1).

id Assessment criteria

A2 Ability to adapt the description of an algo-

rithm depending on the executor (i.e., the

robot)

A4 Understand that the robot needs to stop

when the entire square has been drawn

P1 Ability to describe the effect of small

changes while programming the robot

P2 Ability to explain the presence of selection

in the developed code

P3 Ability to tell what part of the code is being

executed by the robot

DA3 Ability to connect a robot/mobile phone

via USB to the PC

DA4 Ability to ask relevant questions while us-

ing the Web, and basic awareness of some

risks related to it

DC1 Ability to add effects to pictures when

needed, and to write texts for the blog us-

ing various fonts and colors

DC2 Ability to identify the correct tool for each

activity (e.g., writing, coding, etc.)

DC3 Overall quality of the blog

SE1 Ability to organize small releases, based on

user stories, and to test frequently to obtain

a working prototype

SE2 Ability to listen to a customer’s feedback

and use it during the following iteration

SE3 Ability to integrate changes to the solution

(seven), parents decide how long per day students

can use a computer, and check what they are doing

(seven); six students also enjoy showing to their par-

ents what they have been doing. Parents represent the

primary source of help (nine), but only six students

enjoy using a computer together with their parents,

usually for internet browsing. Four students deﬁned a

robot as “a non-living-being created by technology”;

one student even deﬁned it as “a person who could

help with activities and research”. This strong associ-

ation of robots with humanoids is also evident when

students draw a robot: all the drawings represent hu-

manoids (Figure 1 shows an example). When asked,

“what do you think you should do to create a robot?”,

only two participants mentioned programming, while

all the others focused on the building aspect.

6 RESULTS

Figure 2 summarizes the assessment results, which

show the effectiveness of the proposed approach

(RQ2).

CSEDU 2020 - 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

354

Area of Algorithms. The assessment of this area

takes place during Part 3 and Part 4. During the Tell

Me How You Make Toast exercise, one of the three

teams provided a precise solution (objective A3 in Ta-

ble 1) immediately because they were already aware

of the need of being precise without taking some steps

for granted (A2), such as “plug the toaster into a

power outlet”. The other two teams presented cor-

rect (A3) but less precise solutions; however, they ac-

tively participated in the discussion during the review

of the results and, in the end, demonstrated a satisfac-

tory comprehension of the principles behind it (A2).

In Part 4, all the teams understood that the algorithm

needed to be even more precise than in Part 2, since a

robot was going to execute it (A2). The message was

that, for example, we could avoid telling a person to

cut the bread to prepare a toast, while a robot can not

guess omitted instructions.

As expected, the ﬁrst part of the Coding Game

generated misunderstandings due to the lack of clear

conventions. Thus, the teams dedicated a large part

of the game to successfully decide a shared set of

conventions (A1) including, for example, the point of

view taken for each instruction: when executing an

arrow to the right, do we consider the right side of the

pawn or of who is moving it? After ﬁnding an agree-

ment on a set of shared rules, all the teams completed

the game correctly (A2, A3), and all the participants

were actively engaged in the activity. All the partici-

pants could identify end-conditions (A4) both during

unplugged exercises (e.g., the toast is ready) and dur-

ing the robotics project (i.e., the square is complete).

Therefore, we achieved two-thirds of our objectives.

Area of Programming. All the teams delivered a

simple yet working solution. The code is slightly

different for the three teams: one team created a se-

quence of instructions; the second team found the re-

peat block and, after some explanations, refactored

Figure 1: One Answer to the Question “draw a Robot”.

the solution using a repeat four times. The third team

also refactored the solution, but just inserted a repeat

three times after drawing the ﬁrst side of the square.

None of the solutions implement a selection (P2). Fa-

vored also by the linearity of the solution, all the stu-

dents could explain the robot behavior expected after

a change in the code (P1). Moreover, they could tell

what part of the code was executed by the robot (P3).

Therefore, we achieved half of our objectives.

Figure 2: Summary of the Assessment Results.

Area of Digital Awareness. While populating the

blog, all the participants demonstrated an excellent

ability to connect different devices (DA3), for exam-

ple, to transfer pictures. During Part 2, all the partici-

pants showed a good understanding of the provided

notions about the Web, the Internet, and PC hard-

ware, but summarizing these notions in a blog post

was challenging for most of them. However, after an

additional explanation, the participants could success-

fully write their posts (DA1, DA2). All the partici-

pants were already conscious of some internet secu-

rity issues. Therefore, we introduced the concept of

privacy and data tracking, and a short explanation of

how e-mails and URLs work. During a group dis-

cussion to review these concepts, all the participants

demonstrated a good yet basic understanding (DA4).

Area of Digital Creativity. All the participants could

easily choose the software they needed to complete

different tasks (DC2), such as writing posts and mod-

ifying pictures. Even though the blog structure im-

posed some restrictions, the ﬁnal result shows a good

level of creativity, especially in the choice of fonts,

colors, and size (DC1). The presentation in the blog

can be considered adequate, and the quality is accept-

able (DC3) when considering that this was the very

ﬁrst blogging experience for all the participants.

Area of Software Engineering. All the participants

got a ﬁrst understanding of the XP practices, as they

started (SE1) using their post-its (user stories) to

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Middle Schools by Combining Robotics and Blogging

355

guide the production process and decide when a pro-

totype (small releases and testing) was ready for the

meeting with the on-site customer. Moreover, all the

teams took advantage of the customer’s feedback to

improve the solution (SE2). However, we frequently

had to solicit the teams to stop working with the

robot to dedicate some time to other activities, such

as stand-up meetings. Most of the time, reminding

them that stand-up meetings represented an excellent

chance to prepare some material for the blog worked

as a motivating factor.

All the teams demonstrated an excellent ability to

integrate changes to the solution. Thanks to the block-

based programming environment, they integrated the

new features on top of the existing ones (Fronza et al.,

2019a) by making frequently sure that the changes did

not negatively affect or break the existing code (SE3).

The proposed activity covered a limited number of

hours, and the assigned task was rather trivial. These

characteristics certainly did not recreate a real profes-

sional environment but supported our goal of start-

ing a progressive set of activities, during which the

didactic transposition of the Agile methods becomes

closer and closer to the professional setting, also by

increasing the difﬁculty of the programming task. Un-

der consideration of this idea, we consider the results

of this experience as an indicator that students reacted

positively to this ﬁrst time they were exposed to a SE

approach. Indeed, although we did not provide addi-

tional lectures on SE, students adapted to the new or-

ganization of the work process, by taking advantage

of frequent iterations and customer’s feedback.

Curricular Objectives. As part of the curricular ob-

jectives, teachers had to ensure that students achieved

the ability to: 1) create simple websites or blogs, 2)

access the Internet with conﬁdence, and 3) respect the

teachers conﬁrmed that all the participants achieved

these objectives at the desired level.

7 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

This paper provides educators with a practical exam-

ple of how to cover several areas of technology in a

way for middle school students to be engaged and to

spark future interest. Speciﬁcally, it shows how it is

possible to achieve the CS learning objectives and fos-

ter SE principles while fulﬁlling the existing curricu-

lar objectives (RQ1). Even though the proposed activ-

ities have been designed by taking into account spe-

ciﬁc context factors, the fundamental design princi-

ples can generalize to other contexts. Indeed, the pro-

posed module does not introduce additional SE lec-

tures, which is crucial to middle schools, where stu-

dents would not perceive these additional lectures as

useful. Moreover, we considered a context in which

CS is taught as part of other disciplines, which hap-

pens frequently and hinders the reservation of time

for other content that does not directly contribute to

achieving the curricular learning objectives. Finally,

the considered learning objectives (Table 1) can be

reasonably present in other curricula.

The proposed assessment framework has been ap-

plied to analyze the outcome of the ﬁrst classroom ex-

perience, and the obtained results show the effective-

ness of the approach (RQ2). Further experiments are

needed to generalize these results by involving other

groups of participants. Moreover, the possible effect

of language should be analyzed: in this experience,

the ofﬁcial language was Italian, which could have

increased the difﬁculty for German mother-tongue

speakers. Additionally, the possible effects of partici-

pants’ backgrounds should also be inspected.

The results of this paper are encouraging for work-

ing on the development of our next modules dedicated

to middle schools, to progressively cover all the ob-

jectives included in the reference document for the

informatics curriculum. Moreover, the proposed Area

of Software Engineering (and its assessment frame-

work) needs to be further extended by including more

practices to support the development process.

This work, together with our previous ones

(Fronza and Pahl, 2019; Fronza et al., 2019b), shows

that it is possible to foster SE principles in K-12 with

no or minimum programming tasks. It remains to be

explored whether and how these activities will help

to improve code quality when students write code to

solve non-trivial tasks. Finally, performing a class-

room experience next year with the same group of stu-

dents would allow us to test for retention, and check

if students are improving towards the achievement of

the ﬁnal objectives of the middle school curriculum.

REFERENCES

Barricelli, B. R., Cassano, F., Fogli, D., and Piccinno, A.

(2019). End-user development, end-user program-

ming and end-user software engineering: A system-

atic mapping study. Journal of Systems and Software,

149:101–137.

Bocconi, S., Chioccariello, A., Dettori, G., Ferrari, A.,

Engelhardt, K., et al. (2016). Developing computa-

tional thinking in compulsory education-implications

for policy and practice. Technical report, Joint Re-

search Centre (Seville site).

Bollin, A., Pasterk, S., Antonitsch, P., and Sabitzer, B.

CSEDU 2020 - 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

356

(2016). Software engineering in primary and sec-

ondary schools-informatics education is more than

programming. In Software Engineering Education

and Training (CSEET), 2016 IEEE 29th International

Conference on, pages 132–136. IEEE.

Burnett, M. (2009). What is end-user software engineering

and why does it matter? In International Symposium

on End User Development, pages 15–28. Springer.

Burnett, M. M. and Myers, B. A. (2014). Future of end-user

software engineering: beyond the silos. In Proceed-

ings of the on Future of Software Engineering, pages

201–211. ACM.

Burning Glass Technologies (2016). Beyond point and

click: the expanding demand for coding skill. https:

//bit.ly/2YYL60A. Accessed 18 Feb. 2020.

Chevallard, Y. and Gilman, C. (1991). La transposici

did

actica: del saber sabio al saber ense

nado, volume

1997. Aique Buenos Aires.

Forlizzi, L., Lodi, M., Lonati, V., Mirolo, C., Monga, M.,

Montresor, A., Morpurgo, A., and Nardelli, E. (2018).

A core informatics curriculum for italian compulsory

education. In International Conference on Informat-

ics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives,

pages 141–153. Springer.

Fronza, I., El Ioini, N., and Corral, L. (2016). Blending

mobile programming and liberal education in a social-

economic high school. In Proceedings - International

Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Sys-

tems, MOBILESoft 2016, pages 123–126.

Fronza, I., El Ioini, N., Pahl, C., and Corral, L. (2019a).

Bringing the Beneﬁts of Agile Techniques Inside

the Classroom: A Practical Guide, pages 133–152.

Springer Singapore, Singapore.

Fronza, I., Ioini, N. E., and Corral, L. (2017). Teach-

ing computational thinking using agile software en-

gineering methods: A framework for middle schools.

ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE),

17(4):19.

Fronza, I. and Pahl, C. (2019). Teaching software engineer-

ing principles in non-vocational schools. In Proceed-

ings of the 11th International Conference on Com-

puter Supported Education (CSEDU), pages 252–261.

Fronza, I., Pahl, C., and Susanj, B. (2019b). A didac-

tic module to teach software engineering principles

in middle schools. In Proceedings of the 20th An-

nual SIG Conference on Information Technology Ed-

ucation, SIGITE ’19, pages 168–168, New York, NY,

USA. ACM.

Fronza, I. and Zanon, P. (2015). Introduction of computa-

tional thinking in a hotel management school [intro-

duzione del computational thinking in un istituto al-

berghiero]. Mondo Digitale, 14(58):28–34.

Gartner Inc. (2017). Market Guide for Rapid Mobile App

Development Tools.

Hazzan, O., Dubinsky, Y., and Meerbaum-Salant, O.

(2010). Didactic transposition in computer science ed-

ucation. ACM Inroads, 1(4):33–37.

Kastl, P., Kiesm

uller, U., and Romeike, R. (2016). Start-

ing out with projects: Experiences with agile software

development in high schools. In Proceedings of the

11th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing

Education, pages 60–65. ACM.

Ko, A. J., Abraham, R., Beckwith, L., Blackwell, A., Bur-

nett, M., Erwig, M., Scafﬁdi, C., Lawrance, J., Lieber-

man, H., Myers, B., et al. (2011). The state of the art

in end-user software engineering. ACM Computing

Surveys (CSUR), 43(3):21.

Martin, R. C. (2003). Agile Software Development: Prin-

ciples, Patterns, and Practices. Prentice Hall PTR,

Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA.

Meerbaum-Salant, O. and Hazzan, O. (2010). An agile

constructionist mentoring methodology for software

projects in the high school. ACM Transactions on

Computing Education, 9(4):n4.

Monteiro, I. T., de Castro Salgado, L. C., Mota, M. P., Sam-

paio, A. L., and de Souza, C. S. (2017). Signifying

software engineering to computational thinking learn-

ers with agentsheets and polifacets. Journal of Visual

Languages & Computing, 40:91–112.

Oakley, B., Felder, R. M., Brent, R., and Elhajj, I. (2004).

Turning student groups into effective teams. Journal

of student centered learning, 2(1):9–34.

Rico, D. F. and Sayani, H. H. (2009). Use of agile meth-

ods in software engineering education. In 2009 Agile

Conference, pages 174–179. IEEE.

Romeike, R. and G

ottel, T. (2012). Agile projects in high

school computing education: emphasizing a learners’

perspective. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop in

Primary and Secondary Computing Education, pages

48–57. ACM.

Scheubrein, R. (2003). Elements of end-user software

engineering. INFORMS Transactions on Education,

4(1):37–47.

Schneider, J.-G. and Johnston, L. (2005). eXtreme

Programming- helpful or harmful in educating un-

dergraduates? Journal of Systems and Software,

74(2):121–132.

Shaw, M. (2000). Software engineering education: a

roadmap. In Proceedings of the Conference on the Fu-

ture of Software Engineering, pages 371–380. ACM.

Spires, H. A., Hervey, L. G., Morris, G., and Stelpﬂug,

C. (2012). Energizing project-based inquiry: Middle-

grade students read, write, and create videos. Journal

of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(6):483–493.

Zucconi, L. (1995). Essential knowledge for the practis-

ing software engineer and the responsibilities of uni-

versity and industry for her education. In Confer-

ence on Software Engineering Education, pages 3–13.

Springer.

Teaching Software Engineering Principles in Middle Schools by Combining Robotics and Blogging

357