A means for visualization of skills in software development

Abstract

The total number of students, who graduate from all the colleges of National Institute of Technology (NIT) Japan, is over 10,000 every year. The college graduates are highly evaluated from the industrial world for over 50 years. In order for the students to acquire high skills, the curriculum in NIT should be combined lectures with experiments and/or practical trainings. However the skills of experiments and practical trainings are implicit know-how up to now. Therefore, we make the skills be explicit knowledge for improvement of skills. In this paper, we propose a method to visualize the skills, and we introduce an approach to decide the level of achievement of experiments and practical training skills. This approach is almost based on original lab manuals, but in order to evaluate of ICT and Software skills, we attempt to use "i Competency Dictionary". In order to propose our methods, we checked and evaluated over 300 lab manuals. The experimental skill-sheets and the evaluation-sheets that are the vital part of our methods, have been developed using the learning items, which derived from those manuals in manually. It is possible to visualize each student's skills by defining evaluation standard with the sheets. The evaluation standard is one of the tools to guide students to their final target effectively and clearly. Using our methods, the level of achievement and the motivation of students' skills will be improved drastically in the experimental subjects and practical trainings.