Group Maker Tool for Software Engineering Projects

Project-based learning is widely used in various academic fields. Nevertheless, software engineering projects have a special statute due to their interdisciplinary features. Unlike other academic disciplines, software engineering requires knowledge from diverse engineering areas, but also from system modeling and design, business domain, communication. In order to maximize the learning benefits and to facilitate obtaining successful projects, the teacher has to be actively involved in all the phases of the project life cycle, including team formation. This article presents a new application which implements the collaborative learning paradigm through project-based learning in software engineering. The model automates the process of optimal grouping of students in teams based on a skill inventory created by the teacher. The collected answers related to students' skills will help the teacher to built the most equilibrate groups in one's class. The grouping is made taking into account various criteria. Once groups are formed, students can collaborate by chatting in the project's forum or by attaching additional files to their project. Preliminary results are provided and discussed in the context of various groupware tools. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.