How to teach software development

re: How to teach software development

Richard Veryard — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 02:55:53 GMT

Alan

I agree absolutely with your criticism of most software engineering degree courses in the UK. Some university teachers claim that it is the students who insist on individual assessment and complain about group assessment. (Who's in charge of the process here?)

Many university lecturers also have no sense of scale, and are unable to teach their students the difference between a 100-line program and a 100 KLOC package.

But it is not so bad in some other countries. When I have taught courses in Denmark, my students are well accustomed to group assessment and have complained (mildly) about individual assessment.

cheers, Richard

re: How to teach software development

Bjorn Freeman-Benson — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 23:02:26 GMT

The "real projects in a real company" is nice, but unless the course has an educational objective, plan, and evaluation technique, then it's relying on the students to figure out how to learn rather than helping them learn. The key to teaching well is to figure out what you want the students to learn, how you are going to get them to understand the issues and the solutions, and how you are going to figure out if they did. Just throwing them into "the real world" is no more valid than just lecturing to them.

A colleague and I taught an interesting software engineering course where we simulated "the real world". The key difference was that we could tweak reality in order to teach them specific lessons. Of course, each of us had over a decade of real developer experience so we could simulate pretty well.

We were just using the same technique that airlines do when they use Flight Simulators for training rather than going up in a A380 and just hoping that an engine will fail in order to provide that (engine fail) lesson.

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