Integrating a research component into a web development introductory course

Exposing students to research topics enhances their learning experience. It is therefore desirable for instructors to include a research component into their courses. The courses most prone for incorporating research components are the upper level undergraduate and graduate courses. However, this becomes challenging in the case of introductory courses, where learning new programming skills is the focus. In this case, the research component needs to satisfy two key conditions: to be easy enough to implement, and to have a fast learning curve. In this paper we describe the introduction of a research component into an introductory Web development course (upper undergraduate and lower graduate) for software engineering students. In this context we present a Web security research application that is successful at keeping unwanted malicious attacks from happening on Web services. It can be implemented using basic Web development skills and fast to learn and rationale. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the research problem, the students have been exposed to techniques and research topics in several other fields. The projects outcome including student experiences conducting user studies and human surveys are discussed in the paper.