The design of Sweden's first 5-year computer science and software engineering program

Abstract

In 2013 Linkoping University started the first 5-year engineering program in Computer Science and Software Engineering in Sweden. The goals of the program are to provide a holistic perspective on modern large scale software development, to provide a deep and broad understanding of computer science and computational thinking, and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. The student response has been very good with more than 600 applicants to the 30 slots, of which more than 130 had this program as their first choice among all programs in Sweden. In this paper we present the goals, the design principles, and the resulting program. The ACM/IEEE CS Curricula has been used to make sure that the program provides a solid foundation in Computer Science. Three pedagogical ideas that we have used are (1) project courses to integrate theory and practice as well as provide experience with the most common form of working in industry; (2) courses that cover multiple programming paradigms and languages as well as multiple software development methodologies so that the students are prepared to take on the continual changes we know will come; and (3) a special course in engineering professionalism with groups of students from the first three years together reflecting on topics related to being a professional engineer. The paper concludes with a discussion about some important aspects such as computational thinking and the relation to the ACM/IEEE CS Curricula.