IIE’s Varsity College Waterfall always strives to make its students’ experience as enjoyable as possible, whether in or outside the lecture rooms.
IT lecturers and students from the IIE’s Varsity College campuses can now use an IT activity that can help improve students’ analytical skills as they use the top-down approach to analyse an existing application.
Programme manager for the School of Information Technology at the Waterfall campus, Handsome Mpofu has designed a new teaching activity for third-year IT students registered for the module called open-source coding.
The activity requires the students to create an Android application that connects to Google Maps web services to consume data and display it on a map for the users.
It uses an instructional strategy called ‘backward chaining’, where the entire student activity is broken down into successive sub-tasks.
The sub-tasks focusing on challenging web service concepts can then be identified, as this activity is designed to address the web service concepts and how to use them to implement an Android application.
“Innovation is a process that starts with how we encourage our students to think, research, critique, and formulate ideas to design and implement the solutions. That starts with classroom activities that inspire the students to be inquisitive, analytical, and innovative without reinventing the wheel,” said Mpofu.
He explained that in previous years, students always struggled with creating Android applications that connected to online web services and Application Programming Interfaces, and request data.
He said students had to programmatically analyse the response data to extract specific data and present it to the Android application user in an informative way. “Students always find writing code to connect to web services or Application Programming Interfaces difficult, with some students not completing their assessment because of this.
“This activity is meant to address the challenge by exposing students to the critical concepts earlier in their semester, making it easy to complete the main task using the same concepts later in the semester.”
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