Effective pedagogical principles and practices in teaching software engineering through projects

This paper distills time-tested pedagogical principles and a package of corresponding practices from our experience teaching a project-based course in software engineering to Computer Science undergraduate majors, and from refining the course based upon extensive feedback by students and instructors. Our main contributions are the documentation of key principles that have successfully guided us in structuring, navigating, and evolving the course over the years; the introduction of several novel supporting practices (while adapting others from the literature); and the discovery of the synergistic effect that the proposed package of pedagogical practices creates. The discussion is grounded with data from a large body of comprehensive end-of-term student surveys, post- course instructor retrospectives, and direct instructor observations - all assembled over multiple terms. We hope to offer pragmatic ideas and tools to instructors of software engineering and of similar project-based courses.