Development of mobile applications as part of the computer science engineer curriculummethodological and assessment considerations

Resumen

Since the word ‘‘app’’ was named ‘‘Word of the Year’’ by the American Dialect Society in 2010, the demand for educationin mobile technologies has never been greater. This paper describes the experience gained while teaching mobile appsdevelopment as a subject in a Computer Science engineering curriculum for three academic years. We provide a descriptionof the teaching and assessment processes adopted, based on a Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach and a weightedself/peer/teacher assessment schema respectively,tackling the main issues that arise when considering these methodologies.Throughout these three course editions a total of 37 students have followed the subject and instructors have given them agreat degree of freedom to propose their own projects. This has led to a high degree of motivation and ambition, and it hasbeen rarely necessary to push any additional functionality into their initial proposals. Moreover, the projects as a wholehave covered not only a good sample of the most important mobile computing aspects but also very different applicationareas. On top of this, we have also analyzed the implications of introducing peer- and self-assessment components into theevaluation system. In this respect, we have concluded that not only peer- but also self-assessment can be acceptably closeand correlated to the marks given by the teachers. We believe that our observations, results and experiences could be usefulin inspiring other teachers when designing other higher education courses (or parts of them), especially those sharing thebasic characteristics of those described in this work.