The ability to work in teams is becoming an important skill for graduating IT-students. The business often requires graduates to work in agile, multidisciplinary teams. We aim to gather the educational environments in Norway that offer practical courses on software engineering (or bachelors’ theses within the field) for BSc and MSc students. The target audience for this workshop is educators and others involved in teaching courses where students work in teams to develop systems and/or services.
In spring 2019, the dept. of Computer Science at UiO offered a 20 ECTS course on teamwork within software engineering for the first time, with more than 200 students following the course. Based on cases developed in cooperation with the Institute of Meteorology, the students were tasked to build their own weather apps, using agile methods in practice. We would like to share our experiences from teaching this course, and discuss with other institutions in Norway within this field.
The aim of this workshop is to learn from each other’s experiences in teaching large-scale courses on software engineering. Examples of exchange of experiences could be:
- Use of active teaching practices in lectures and seminars
- Challenges of project-based courses with teams of 5-7 students (anything from forming teams, cooperation and team dynamics to evaluating student work individually vs. per-team)
- How to teach the students good use of techniques and practices (for instance, use of technical tools, agile methods, version control)