Search

This article reports an undergraduate software engineering project in which, over a period of 2 years, four student teams from different cohorts developed a note-taking app for four academic clients at the students' own university. We investigated how projects involving internal clients can give students the benefits of engaging in real software development while also giving them experience of a student-staff collaboration that has its own benefits for students, academics, and the university more broadly. As the university involved is a Sino-Foreign university located in China, where most students are Chinese and most teaching staff are not, this 'student as co-producer' approach interacts with another feature of the project: cultural distance. Based on analysis of notes, reports, interviews, and focus groups, we recommend that students should be provided with communicative strategies for dealing with academics as clients; universities should develop policies on ownership of student-staff collaborations; and projects should include a formalised handover process. This article can serve as guidance for educators considering a 'students as co-producers' approach for software development projects.

This paper analyses the development of China's creative and cultural industries using the city of Shanghai as a case study. The authors argue that while the difficulty of applying a uniform policy to the whole of China has created ambiguities which creative workers can exploit for their own ends, the opportunities that these afford are more economic in orientation as creativity still takes place within the parameters laid down by the Chinese government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]