If you are a college teaching Computer Science or IT, or a training institute teaching programming, then you will find this page relevant.

Xsemble reduces the job of creating a software application into developing hundreds of smaller programs or modules. These modules can be so small that they can be developed even by college students. These development assignments expose the students to the practical aspects of programming, and puts the onus of problem solving and learning onto them which is most needed.

Please refer to the “Student Enablement Experiment” talk by Ms Tokekar madam on the Xsemble launch event page to see how it could work out in practice.

10Xofy Offering to the Educational Institutes

10Xofy offers mass internships or mass projects to college students. They work on the projects from their own college labs, or laptops. They are mentored by the college faculty.

Here is how it works:

  1. Software Project Requirement may come from anywhere. These could be outside projects or college’s internal projects. It is possible to devise internal project requirements based on what learning needs to be imparted to the students.
  2. The Project delivery house uses Xsemble and breaks the requirement into requirements of small modules. Often, it is not a one time function but a continuous one to be used in iterative development. The delivery house delivers the module requirements to the college and evaluates the received ones on pre-decided criteria which involves static code analysis and running unit tests. The delivery house tracks the project progress using something like Kanban charts. This delivery house is either 10Xofy itself or some other entity designated by 10Xofy.
  3. The college receives the module requirements and deliver those. The students are assisted by the faculty mentors within the college. The college needs to set reasonable expectations about the student availability (with respect to their academics) and capabilities (as they would take more time to deliver while learning). The students are divided into small teams and are distributed modules as per their liking, existing skillsets and any skillset to acquire. The main source of learning would be the material available on the internet, the context being provided by the module at hand. Module development does not need Xsemble. It can be done with a standard IDE.

 

In the model, one needs to balance the two objectives, namely student learning and project delivery. The later is expected to be slow with students. This would fit the project requirements where budgets are low and slow progress is acceptable.

Depending on the objectives of the college, the model could be further tuned for purposes such as:

  • Making students specialists in only one area. For example, some students would specialize in UI aspects and some others may want to specialize in databases.
  • Making students generalists – to get a variety of skills demonstrably.
  • Synchronizing the module development with the theory learning. For instance, when the students take a course on data science, the learning would be concretized by giving assignments of developing modules pertaining to data science.

Down the line, the students with increased skillset could become more employable, and some of them might want to come together and create startups.

Contact us if you are a college or training institute that teaches programming.