Educating students by “real-world” software engineering practice — Designing software engineering practice course

Introductory Software Engineering courses present the principles in isolation from practice. Teaching the lectures seems to focus on philosophy and methodology level, which leads to difficulty for students having no practical experience to understand. To solve this problem, we design Software Engineering Practice course at Peking University, and educate students by “Real-world” software engineering practice. Through this course, students can understand fundamental software engineering theories and technologies, and apply appropriate software engineering methods and technologies to solve problems. This paper focuses on how to design Software Engineering Practice course, and introduces the experience and lessons when creating the course.