Traditional Software Engineering Courses Research Articles

Infusing sustainability into software engineering education: Lessons learned from capstone projects

Sustainable development (SD) has become a millennium challenge for humanity. It has boosted the integration of sustainable, sound practices across different fields (e.g. e-participation, smart transportation, sustainable agriculture). Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have strongly supported social transitions in becoming more sustainable and participative over the last two decades. Integrating multi-disciplinary sustainability concepts into the higher education of computer scientists is important in that this ensures that future ICT endeavours will take sustainability concerns into account. This article describes four capstone projects developed by students from the Erasmus Mundus Master Course in Pervasive Computing and Communications for Sustainable Development (PERCCOM), who were enrolled alongside regular students in a traditional software engineering course held at the Lappeenranta University of Technology. The coursework was part of a research project called Green.Citizen@ICT, which aims at investigating the use of ICT and software services for infusing sustainable habits in citizens through the development of applications for SD. This study demonstrates how a sustainable development focus can be integrated into a traditional software engineering course. The goal of this article is to enhance understanding of the integration of sustainability into software engineering education, by providing a detailed example of a master course in which this took place. This course supported the development of ICT competences for building cleaner, greener, and more resource- and energy-efficient cyber-physical systems, while addressing the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

The Innovation of Software Engineering Course in The Non-Computer Professional

Starting with the generation of the software engineering, the development of software engineering is discussed in this paper. On this basis, we analyze the shortcomings in traditional software engineering courses. Especially for the characteristics of software engineering course in the non-computer professional, a new method is explored—practice-based teaching methods.

Two for One: Squeezing Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering into a Core Computer Science Course

The final report of the Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula (CC2001) suggests that an updated computer science curricula must reflect the broadening nature of our discipline. Two areas that are included in the CC2001 are software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI). While the first inclination might be to incorporate HCI concepts into a traditional SE course, we propose a different approach. This paper outlines a project-oriented HCI course in which we are able to emphasize some SE notions in the context of HCI concepts. Our course is also a maturation class for our students because they are exposed to a number of non-programming computer science activities, including project specification, software and interface design, user testing, prototyping and use of guidelines. We include an overview of course content that illustrates our approach. We also describe our coverage of specific CC2001 knowledge units and provide some feedback data for our course.

Turing the tables

The most recent report of the Computing Curricula 2001 (CC2001) suggests that updated curricula must reflect the broadening nature of our discipline. Two areas that are included in the strawman draft of CC2001 are software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HC). While the first inclination might be to incorporate these minimal HC concepts in a traditional SE course, we propose a different approach. This paper outlines a project oriented HC course in which we are able to emphasize SE in the context of HC concepts. We include an overview of course content that illustrates our approach.