Agile Projects to Foster Cooperative Learning in Heterogeneous Classes

Teaching programming novices in secondary education is often described as a challenge, because student groups are often quite heterogeneous. Teachers react with special methods e.g. with individualized teaching, group work or project-based learning. As such a method for computer science education, that supports project-based learning agile projects are being discussed more recently. In the context of a design-based research work, experienced teachers have adapted and applied a theory-derived agile model in a wide range of contexts. In this qualitative case-study, we analyze 11 interviews with 6 teachers on their observations from 20 agile projects with over 400 students. The aim is to gain insight into how agile practices assist individual learning processes and how they help teachers to design and organize projects in order to support students individually. A structured content analysis shows that agile teams face similar obstacles as teams in plan driven projects, but that they can overcome them better in agile projects. Additionally, the analysis indicates that in agile projects the quantity and quality of interactions increases, which has positive effects on the construction of sustainable skills and that students furthermore are frequently involved in feedback processes and reflections, which makes their learning more goal-oriented. Moreover, the data shows that teachers can identify their students' strengths and weaknesses better and also observe their individual learning processes better throughout agile project. Based on that knowledge they can design their agile project in a way that each student is challenged systematically and purposefully.