Making CS/IT education more immersive

This month's Communications of the ACM includes an article by Thomas A. Limoncelli on Four Ways to Make CS and IT More Immersive. The author laments that by and large, CS students aren't learning best practices in the classroom, and offers four specific pieces of advice for serving students better.


1. Use best-of-breed Dev/Ops tools from the start: the normal way for students to work on coding tasks should be to use Git, submit via commit/push, and provide pointers to CI reports.

In our ESaaS course and MOOC, students do just this. Git is used from day one, and student projects (in the campus version of the course, and a coming-soon Part 3 MOOC) are required to include coverage, CodeClimate, and CI badges on their repo front pages. Homework submission is often via deployment to Heroku.

2. Homework programs, even Hello World, should generate Web pages, not text. This requires understanding minimal bits of SaaS architecture, languages, and moving parts.

ESaaS’s first assignment is indeed a Hello World for Ruby, but the very next one has students manipulating a simple SaaS app built using Sinatra. The goal is to get students “thinking SaaS” early on.

3. Curricula should start with a working system that shows best practices, not just build from low-level to higher-level abstractions.

ESaaS’s second assignment has students examining code for a simple Sinatra app that follows good coding practices, includes integration and unit tests (before students have been introduced to creating or reading code for such tests), and is activated by deploying to the public cloud.

4. Focus on reading, understanding, and adding value to an existing system—not just on greenfield development. The former is much more common than the latter in the software engineering profession.

ESaaS indeed includes a 2-part homework assignment on enhancing legacy code, but more exciting, an increasing fraction of all projects undertaken in Berkeley’s version of the course (10/11 projects in summer 2017 offering of the course; 13/20 in Fall 2017 offering) are existing, functioning legacy systems wanting additional features.

Our course materials are freely available on edX as the 2-part (soon to be 3-part) MOOC sequence Agile Development Using Ruby on Rails, and plenty of instructor materials are available for teachers wanting to use this content or the accompanying textbook in a SPOC.