Work in progress - using emerging technologies to assess student software development projects

Abstract

To improve student engagement, Radford University's (RU) Department of Information Technology has established an award competition for the best student project team from among our software engineering and information systems senior capstone courses. This research focuses on the use of emerging technologies for assessing projects from different courses with multiple sections and different professors. We have access to a range of new technologies to support this effort, including a campus-wide wireless network and wireless Tablet PCs with useful software. Our report describes a preliminary methodology for conducting the assessment. Besides discovering some impact of competition on student learning, we expect our results will be useful to the academic community-at-large, providing examples of the effective use of new technologies for project-based course assessment