In the liminal space: software design as a threshold skill
Lynda Thomas, Jonas Boustedt, Anna Eckerdal, Robert McCartney, Jan Erik Moström, Kate Sanders, Carol Zander · 2017
"Threshold Skills " have been proposed as a complement to Threshold Concepts [Thomas et al. 2012, Sanders et al. 2012]. While students sometimes experience difficulties with Threshold Concepts, at other times they struggle due to lack of a skill or an inability to combine theoretical with practical knowledge. Improved skills can improve conceptual understanding and vice versa. See, for example, Eckerdal's discussion [2009] of the concepts and practice of programming. Threshold Skills have many of the same characteristics as Threshold Concepts, with a slightly different focus. They are troublesome- they may seem strange, alien, or counterintuitive to the student. They are transformative – but they transform what students can do and their vision of what they can do, as opposed to how they see their discipline. They are integrative – but rather than unifying different concepts, they broaden the list of tasks students can perform. They are semi-irreversible – they do not completely go away but they do degrade over time with lack of use. Unlike Threshold Concepts they must be practiced. Here, we apply this definition to software design: the phase of software development that takes a description of what is to be built and creates a detailed description of how it should be built. Designers must break a problem down into parts and describe solutions to those parts and how they