PROGRAMMING COURSE TEACHING USING GITLAB

Within the context of Universities of Applied Sciences education, the teaching of most engineering subjects needs to complement the basic theory with its practical application, in order to have the students ready to work just after their study finish, particularly in computer science programming courses. In this paper, an innovative experience started in A.A. 2016-17 about exploiting information and communication technologies (ICT) for teaching coding skills in two Web Application software development engineering courses of a third-year bachelor course is described. Exploiting the advantages offered by a consolidated software development management tools such as GitLab, we organized a practical training path where the students could work on their personal computers, synchronize their development assignment online in the web repository, and test the correct running of the code. This allowed the students not only to upload their final submitted assignment, managing deadlines, but also to get contextualized feedback through comments on the exact line of code. A detailed description of the methodological approach and the use of the GitLab tool in this teaching experience is presented together with a preliminary evaluation of the main findings. In conclusion, compared to more traditional ICT tools such as learning management systems (e.g. Moodle) this approach supports, on one hand, more appropriated activities for teaching programming skills with higher efficiency and accuracy for semi-automatic evaluation of coding assignment, and requires, on the other hand, an extra management for the server hardware/ software infrastructure (login, groups, projects, permissions, forking etc.) with a technical knowledge of the subject and the tool.