The 106th Installment
Two Training Camps at enPiT2
by Yoshihide Chubachi,
Professor, Master Program of iInformation Systems Architecture
In this column I would like to continue talking about enPiT, which I discussed in the 78th column (Full Scale Measures for the Learning of Agile Development with the AIIT enPiT Program). The enPiT program concluded in 2016. Through the program, we provided PBL-based education for the acquisition of practical agile development skills to AIIT students and participants from outside the university, most of whom were working people. Last year (2017) we launched enPiT 2, an education program for undergraduate students.
enPiT, which was conducted among different universities nationwide with Osaka University as the central location, received an ex-post evaluation (*1) of "S" (noteworthy achievements were acknowledged, the initial project goals were sufficiently met, and results greatly exceeded the initial objective) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Along with the educational program itself, AIIT also takes pride in having contributed to this evaluation by promoting faculty members' FD activities through FD training camps and through initiatives such as the Women's Committee, which benefited from the dedication of specially appointed associate professor Miho Nagase
As I note in the aforementioned 78th installment, the FD training camp is now being held as an enPiT event with the support of the enPiT FD Working Group, which I proposed. What began as a modest lightning talk conference by concerned parties is now being conducted as enPiT 2, a full-fledged training camp, and has been held every year in the summer and winter. As the one who got the wheels rolling, I am happy to see that the faculty collaboration fostered through enPiT has carried through and flourished further in enPiT 2.
Instead of postgraduate students, enPiT 2 is being offered to undergraduates. AIIT, as many know, is a professional graduate school with a large number of working students. Figuring out how best to have undergraduates take part in the program was a concern when planning enPiT 2. We were fortunate to have the University of the Ryukyus support the program to develop agile development engineers that we are currently conducting and encourage many of the undergraduates now participating to participate in enPiT 2. Additionally, thanks to the connections of faculty members at AIIT, the program is now also joined by students from universities that previously had not taken part in enPiT, including Tokyo Woman's Christian University last year and Kaetsu University and National Institute of Technology, Sendai College this year.
The centerpiece of the educational program AIIT is providing through enPiT 2 is a training camp-style course conducted over a five-day period during summer break. The content of this course is as follows.
On Day 1, students take part in classroom learning and workshops to acquire a basic knowledge of how to develop teams in order to develop highly-agile products based on an agile development method known as scrum.
On Day 2, students engage in an experiential agile development workshop that lets them build and improve on their own teams and experience the process of recursive and progressive product development through teamwork.
On Day 3, students perform test-driven development via mob programming, along with practicing writing clean code that runs correctly while designing a program progressively. Programming skills are improved through intensive practice that focuses on designing and implementing software.
On Day 4, in order to acquire the skillset for team development, students engage in exercises beginning with Git command basics and ending with a method for distributed collaborative development called GitHub Flow. Students also go through a development exercise that has them use the agile development skills they learned on Day 1 and Day 2 to build a static website as a team.
On Day 5, students review what they learned and experienced over the previous four days. This involves drawing up plans for improvement in order to make use of what they learned, along with planning how to go about team planning as part of the Fall semester enrichment program.
As of the time of this writing, this year's summer training camp has ended and universities are starting their PBL programs. It would be wonderful if the students leveraged what they learned at the summer training camp to ultimately achieve great things in PBL.
The next FD training camp is scheduled to be held in December in Okinawa. I expect many faculty members to participate, talk about the various issues encountered in PBL-based education, and discuss action plans for the future.
