Using GitHub in the design of e-activities for software refactoring

• Published in: Education in the knowledge society Vol. 16; no. 4; pp. 81 - 96
• Main Authors: Carlos LÓPEZ, Jesús M. ALONSO, Raúl MARTICORENA, Jesús M. MAUDES
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Spanish
• Published: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca 01.12.2015
• Subjects: eactividades; evaluación; Github repositorio de proyectos software; proceso enseñanza aprendizaje online; Refactorización; taxonomía de Bloom
• ISSN: 2444-8729
• DOI: 10.14201/eks20151648196

The aim of this work is to design, plan, apply and assessment educational activities to help in the teaching-learning process of the concept of refactoring. The teaching methodology used is based on two pillars. The first is a progressive learning of the concept of refactoring by e-activities defined at different levels of knowledge of Bloom’s taxonomy (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation). The second is the use of resources in e-activities that are related to those the student may find during their professional career oriented towards software development: integrated development environments and software project repositories. The result of this work is the definition of a set of Java code refactoring e-activities. The version control functionality of software project repository, i.e.; GitHub, is used in different ways depending on the type of e-activity. Under these assumptions five types of e-activities are designed: Reading and comprehensions, objective tests, problem-based learning, case studies and webinars. The e-activities designed are applied in the context of the course Software Engineering of the Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at the University of Burgos. The paper concludes analyzing some consequences of the experience from the perspective of using these new e-activities in the teaching-learning process as from the perspective of workload involved for both the teacher and the student.