Teamwork makes the dream work, or so the cliché goes. So how do you assess students ability to work together towards shared goals? Teaching students to collaborate in teams (agile or otherwise) is notoriously problematic. Dream work can rapidly descend into a nightmare struggle to motivate the free-riders while restraining the self-appointed dictators. Who gets the credit for what? What did the team agree on exactly? Join us to discuss how to develop students confidence and abilities to collaborate in teams of diverse engineers, from a paper published at ITiCSE. [1] From the Abstract
We had an outdated, unsuitable pair of courses covering software engineering over an academic year, which were rewritten last summer. Out went the plan-driven project approach of GANNT charts, and a belief that ‘better estimates’ would save the day. In came a lightweight focus on a mix of extreme programming and scrum to incrementally, and iteratively build products. The classroom changed too. Out went lecture slides in the classroom, plus self-directed pick and choose practical sessions. In came video-led lectures based on the pandemic experience, experiential learning, and more suitable practical sessions to guide students in what they need know to build their product prototypes.The initial results suggest we are headed in the right direction. It still needs more work, but shows students are developing products more confidently as teams of students.
We’ll be joined by Bruce Scharlau, author of the paper, who’ll give us a five minute lightning talk to kick-off our discussion about teaching team collaboration. All welcome, joining details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us/
References
- Scharlau, Bruce (2023). Being Agile in the Software Engineering Classroom: Using Agile Approaches Instead of Plan-driven Approaches. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), pages 583–584, DOI: 10.1145/3587103.3594154
