Teaching web services and service-oriented architecture using mobile platforms

Even as everyday software increasingly transitions to online software services, many educational projects in software development courses still remain on single-user PC systems. To better prepare our students for this emerging trend in software development, material on web services and service-oriented architecture should become more of a focus in computer science courses. This paper describes our experiences in teaching a senior-level course at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2009 geared around the concepts of web services and service-oriented architecture using the Windows Mobile platform. In this course, students worked in teams to produce web services that could be utilized by other teams to eventually build a campus tour application for the Windows Mobile device. We believe that using mobile devices is an optimal vehicle for teaching service-oriented architecture due to their relatively limited processing power, portability, pervasiveness in society, and interest among students.