New Trends in Mobile Technologies Education in Slovakia: An Empirical Study

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a concept of teaching mobile technologies development as a specific application of the software development lifecycle. We have deployed this concept into the terms of the study program called Business Informatics at the Technical University of Kosice, in Slovakia. Students get familiar with some traditional methods of software development life cycle like waterfall and with Scrum as a representative of the Agile methodologies. We presented the obtained results and experiences from three courses creating a necessary basic for one direction of our master and bachelor's thesis. Our motivation was to cover all necessary stages like design with User Experience, development in line with current trends, testing using appropriate methods and metrics, deployment with a tracking system, monetization and appropriate licensing. From the hardware point of view, we offer different intelligent devices like wearable sensors, bracelets or watches to create various mobile applications for data analytics and visualization methods. Moreover, we invented relevant lectures with some techniques from active learning area like retrieval practice and case-based learning. During first 2 years we have tested suitability of various supporting tools like e.g. YouTrack, JIRA, Slack or Sli.do to improve the students' readiness for real IT projects by simulating working environment in the IT companies.