Teaching Assistant
FIPU Praksa
The goal of the Professional Internship course is to give students practical experience in IT companies through real software design and implementation work while helping them build professional responsibility and teamwork skills.
Thanks to strong collaboration and continuous engagement, internships at the Faculty of Informatics in Pula have been successfully organized for many years. This practical teaching format lets students apply what they learn in real business situations.
To simplify this process, we automated internship execution through the FIPU Praksa application. The system is the result of research and collaboration between students and professors and is based on process-driven development with BPMN models.
About the project
FIPU Praksa has been actively developed since 2023 within the FIPUlab research environment. Its goal is to provide students, coordinators, and employers with a simpler way to apply for, manage, and monitor internships.
The overall system is based on executable BPMN process models. Service tasks can integrate with external services, which makes the platform a workflow management system for internship execution. The solution is organized into three main parts:
- Python BPMN Engine for executing process models, instantiating processes, storing event logs, and triggering service tasks.
Python BPMN Engine - Internship application services including Baserow, SendGrid, and PDF generation integrations used inside the workflow.
- FIPU Praksa frontend which provides an interface for students, coordinators, and employers to interact with the internship process.
The frontend allows students to choose internship models, sign in with a UNIPU account, browse available tasks, submit preferences, complete applications, upload internship journals, and track their status through an interactive BPMN diagram.
Coordinators can review statistics, allocate students, accept or reject tasks, inspect event logs, and contact mentors and students through the workflow interface.
Employers and mentors can submit internship tasks, confirm evaluations, accept or reject assigned students, and communicate through automated email workflows.
As online informatics studies become more common, it is increasingly important to provide students with high-quality digital tools that help them complete obligations efficiently without sacrificing educational quality.
FIPU Praksa is available to undergraduate and graduate informatics students enrolled in the Professional Internship elective course.
The application is available at https://fipu-praksa.unipu.hr/ .