Moving toward “reality” in team selection for software engineering

College students have been bombarded with reality shows. Coupled with extensive video gaming, these weird tasks and challenges have become commonplace for vicarious thrill seekers. Place these same students in a software engineering class where pedagogical norms include process understanding, project design methods, and implementation guidelines, and the class trends toward low-energy and minimal student effort, even with the most state-of-the-art projects. Our approach is to re-energize students using a new mode of competition. The goal is to allow the students to compete for role, team, and project choice. The difficulty in the approach is shaping competitions within the confines of the CS curriculum while maintaining accreditation standards, appropriately grading ldquorealityrdquo challenges, and uniformly configuring teams without ldquooustingrdquo anyone. We introduce the reality software engineering network (REASEN), a set of challenges designed around software engineering principles. We discuss how REASEN fits into a classroom setting and helps incite creativity, team bonding, and more appropriately disclose the skill set of individual students toward fairer and more satisfying team and project selection.