Teaching programming in the large

Designing a senior-level capstone course experience for students enrolled in a software engineering course is challenging. One complicating factor is the need for students to expand their knowledge base from the academic world to the professional world. In particular, it is often problematic for students to understand the differences between the trivial programming projects of their academic experience and the actual level of effort required for production class software found in industry. Even large (by academic standards) software engineering projects developed for real clients rarely match the environment of most professional software projects. At the United States Military Academy, in the senior capstone sequence courses, we were able to provide three of our student teams the opportunity to work on projects in which they provided added functionality to already fielded systems for real clients. Compared to the other 25 student teams that were assigned more traditional student projects, these three teams experienced and learned more about software engineering. However the cost was a much higher level of student frustration and level of effort than the other student teams.