Improving students' learning in software engineering education through multi-level assignments

Assignments and exercises are an essential part of software engineering education. It usually requires a variety of these assignments to cover a desired wide range of educational objectives as defined in the revised Bloom's taxonomy. But such a variety has inherent problems, e.g. that students might not see the connections between the assignments and find it hard to generalize the covered concepts. In this paper we present the educational design pattern Multi-Level Assignment which addresses these problems. It enables the assignment designer to incorporate a variety of educational objectives into a single assignment by including the concepts on multiple knowledge and process levels. The description as educational design pattern and the provided three implementation examples make this approach directly applicable for other software engineering educators.