Using Pbl Focused On Knowledge Exchange To Improve The Learning Of Software Design

This article presents the use of the Project-based Learning approach focused on knowledge exchange to improve the learning process. To reach this goal, we elaborate a learning project to teachs software design, supported by the Knowledge Chains exchange and the Collabore environment, which had been developed on a peer-to-peer platform because of its decentralized approach. This project had been carried out with students of an important Brazilian Computer Graduate School, where each student must design software appliying design patterns. To evaluate the proposed idea, this article describes the case study conducted in a real classroom, which showed strong evidence that this approach was successful and revealed issues that can be improved both in the proposed approach and in the Collabore environment.