Making Lab Sessions Mandatory -- On Student Work Distribution in a Gamified Project Course on Market-Driven Software Engineering
This is an incremental study on improving team dynamics in project-based software engineering education.
The study addressed unfair work distribution in student teams by introducing mandatory programming lab sessions, but found no effect on workload balance, with the intervention being popular among experienced students but unpopular with novice programmers.
Unfair work distribution in student teams is a common issue in project-based learning. One contributing factor is that students are differently skilled developers. In a course with group work intertwining engineering and business aspects, we designed an intervention to help novice programmers, i.e., we introduced mandatory programming lab sessions. However, the intervention did not affect the work distribution, showing that more is needed to balance the workload. Contrary to our goal, the intervention was very well received among experienced students, but unpopular with students weak at programming.