Here I am attending a Computer Science education conference. Started off with an interesting keynote, a break and meet a couple of faculty, and now the first paper session.
How to integrate software engineering into upper-level undergraduate courses? A project centered course, which included readings of selected research, as well as visiting local software development companies. Surveying the students before and after the class, and student confidence went down after the course, because students had learned how difficult the problems are. Yet students were more engaged into learning more about the subject and the resulting projects were of a higher quality.
Using real projects in software testing. Students, in teams, select a real world project. They develop a test plan, provide a progress report (requested by the students), and a final presentation. The instructor is both a customer and a coach. Able to work with the project developers. Target is generally low hundreds of classes in the project. Most students enjoyed the project and enrollment has increased. Students fill out a 360 survey on their teammates, and instructor intervention for outliers both positive and negative.
Student code is not throw aways. Best paper award. Prior work on software maintenance has usually relied on artificially prepared code, including lecturer added bugs. For this work, the code developed by prior seniors (11kloc, java, multithreaded) was provided to juniors in an intermediate version, who then added a feature and fixed bugs. Do students then follow proper practices? Most did, but a minority concluded, for example, that the code could not be tested. Many students observed the importance of quality design and had the experience of working on someone else's code base.
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