Minimising Tertiary Inter-group Connectedness Over Successive Rounds

Rocking the boat is a teaching strategy to rapidly teach tertiary computer science students the required group and communication skills for software engineering. This strategy proposes the introduction of high-risk factors into the group dynamics over short time periods. Group instability is regarded as a risk factor. It is introduced by reshuffling groups between successive rounds. The main examples of allocation methods applied during reshuffling include random allocation, academic standing, participation level and Belbin roles. The reshuffling of groups should ensure that subsequent groups remain heterogeneous with regards to contact between students, that is minimise the inter-group connectedness. Current group formation methods and related software do not focus on the inter-group connectedness over successive group allocations. The construction and tracing of groups by hand to ensure a minimum inter-group connectedness is time-consuming and prone to error. This paper provides a genetic algorithm from the subset of evolutionary algorithms to minimise inter-group connectedness. The proposed algorithm reduces the time and error in constructing groups based on random allocation over successive rounds.