‘Gitting’ Their Feet Wet - A Classroom Intervention Exploring Students’ Learning Experience When Maintaining an Unknown Codebase

This paper presents the outcomes of a classroom intervention simulating industry work conditions. Students worked with solving bugs and adding new features in an already established codebase and had their work structured in GitHub issues. This setting supported a professional approach to project work, including branching, pull requests, code reviews, and merges. Students valued the industry-like work conditions and the opportunity to work on a project where they did not have to start from scratch. The intervention was conducted in an advanced web development course as part of the professional bachelor’s degree in web development at Business Academy Aarhus in Aarhus, Denmark. The evaluation builds on students’ articulations of their learning experience after the first sprint. An analysis of these articulations using the SOLO taxonomy shows that students use language suggesting deep learning in project work-related themes rather than technical themes. We assess this as an essential experience in preparing students for what they will probably face in their first job. We suggest educators utilize old student projects to provide this experience to their current students by letting them add new features or fix bugs in these projects.