Teaching Software Designing Skills

Research has revealed a significant gap between the thinking patterns and software design habits of students or recent computer science university graduates, and those of expert software developers. There may be several causes for this gap, one of which is undoubtedly the fact that throughout their studies students are mostly asked to write software programs of relatively limited scope, and are not usually required to work as part of a team constructing a complex program. In the present paper we will describe a study unit intended to be taught as part of a high school computer science curriculum, which emphasizes the software system aspects. In a study that accompanied the development and actual teaching of the unit, we checked, among other things, whether the students acquired skills for developing a complex software system.