APPLYING VISUAL LEARNING IN THE TEACHING OF SOFTWARE MEASUREMENT CONCEPTS

摘要

Applying new learning methodologies in education, such as visual learning based on virtual reality and three-dimensional (3D) environments, is an important aspect in education, since it offers possibilities that can remarkably improve the current education system. Technological advances, along with the chance to create and represent the varying contents offered by information technologies, make the new learning methodologies the focus of attention in the future. Currently, 3D methodologies are only used in Computer Science to improve physical characteristics (virtual laboratories, virtual worlds, etc.), but they are not used to improve the internal mental processes by which human beings understand and retain abstract concepts. In these cases, the use of visual learning helps to clarify them. In Computer Science, particularly in Software measurement courses, the complexity of the concepts is possibly greater than in other courses because there is a lot of learning material that is based on abstract concepts that students find hard to recognize in the real world. In this paper, we present a visual environment that can be used to learn software measurement concepts like the IFPUG functional size measurement method. To validate the new learning model, an experiment was carried out.