Improving Software Engineering Education through Enhanced Practical Experiences

Teaching software engineering has been a challenging topic. Students gain little practical experience in issues regarding software process in a typical software engineering course, although relevant theories are usually taught in lectures. The lack of practical experience is a bottleneck for effective learning of software engineering. It is almost impossible for students to understand the real concerns of practitioners without adequate practices. Consequently, they are not able to correctly apply the concepts or techniques, which is an important reason why they are regarded as being inexperienced. In addition, to develop increasingly sophisticated software, the IT industry keeps demanding better-prepared software engineering graduates. To address this issue, we developed a teaching method for software engineering course based on the Problem-Based Learning principles. This paper introduces the method, presents our experiences, and discusses the lessons learned.