Work in progress: A student activity dashboard for ensuring project-based learning compliance

Project-based learning is an effective pedagogical tool for software engineering education. Students working in small teams may leverage an industry-practiced software process methodology to define, design, construct, and validate a quality software product. In a project-based environment, students learn both technical competencies in the face of a complex scalable problem, but also contextual knowledge of how process mechanisms help manage that complexity. However, teaching in a project-based environment presents several challenges. The focus of this paper is on the learning process that runs concurrently, and is co-dependent upon, a project's software development lifecycle process. In this approach, student adherence to a set of learning activities in the conduct of a project is considered from a protocol compliance perspective, borrowing vocabulary from clinical domain. This WIP paper reports on the use of a web-based tool to encourage protocol compliance.