PBL + A Teacher's Perspective

To close out the school year, we worked with our friends at Skyline High School to beta our pathways product. We created a project based learning experience that taught the kids about software quality assurance (QA) in the context of a beta product. User acceptance testing is the final phase of the software testing process – and ensures that the real-world scenarios operate according to the intended requirements and specifications.

The lesson included a conversation about what tasks a QA engineer performs on the job, how much they can expect to be paid, and how fast the demand for the job is growing. Then we dove into the hands-on, practical part of lesson. After demonstrating the user scenarios, we asked kids to identify defects (also called bugs) and to report them. We logged all the defects and rewarded the kids who identified issues. One of my favorite questions from the kids was when they asked how many bugs there were to find - as if we had "planted" them to be found. We laughed and let them know that this was real life - and that there is no answer guide. 

The idea was to give kids a bird’s eye view to the importance of having a quality product, while also getting really important feedback directly from the mouths of our users. All the kids learned about a future career opportunity and a handful of the kids even expressed interest in pursuing this particular path. Listen to Amanda, our STEM champion at St. Vrain, as she talks about her experiences with Couragion and the new pathways features.  

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1660021. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.