Most people maybe think that software engineers are only coders that develop and maintain applications, systems, and infrastructures. This is not false. But, software engineers are also responsible for the assessment and improvement of the source code itself, based on specific metrics and techniques. This post briefly discusses how software engineering can evaluate modern software systems.
Given that usually the compiler does not complain about the coding style of a program (i.e. missing white spaces, indentation, long lines of code, name conventions, and comments), developers care only for the functionality of their programs and not for the maintainability. However, this can be harmful for the understanding and maintenance of modern software systems. This post discusses the importance of writing programs based on specific coding guidelines.
In my previous post, I discussed some current and ongoing research on effective pedagogical approaches to STEM education. The problems in STEM education have gained much attention recently due to the growing gap between demand and skill in American STEM jobs, likely due at least in part to lack of interest or discouragement among American students. Continue reading
By now, America’s STEM problem – the growing gap between demand and skill in American jobs in STEM fields – is well recognized (see this commentary by Bill Nye). One source of the problem is a lack of interest in the sciences and mathematics among young Americans that begins at an early age. Continue reading
For the past two years I was the lab assistant for the “Information Systems Design and Implementation — Programming in Java” course, taught by my PhD supervisor Prof. Diomidis Spinellis at the Athens University of Economics and Business. To make the lesson more interesting and give an extra motivation to the students, me, Vassilios Karakoidas and Diomidis decided to distribute e-tokens to the students that actively participated. In return, the students were offered the possibility to better their grades by the end of the semester. In this post I will describe how we did this and I will provide some initial results based on the students feedback.