Page 3 – Educating the next gen of software engineers

Some notes from SECM Workshop @ ICSE 2017

These are my notes from the workshop. It started with a talk by my colleague and friend Diego Fontdevila: Tales from an Agile Journey: Designing Curricula from Millennials in Industry and Academia. While Diego was talking, Nayla Portas took care of graphics facilitation, great work!

The rest of the morning was dedicated to present all the submitted papers and the afternoon was for debating following a fishbowl-like dynamic.

During the afternoon some students join the session to participate in the debate. I am not sure about the exact number of participants but I think we were around 15, including people from Argentina, Brazil, USA, Sweden, Uruguay, Chile, Rusia, Spain, Italy and China.

After the workshop some of the participants went to a near restaurant to share the dinner. It was the earliest dinner I had in my whole life, I was eating meat at the 7 pm!

I want to thank Hakan and Cécile for organising this workshop. It was a really valuable activity, it was great to see people from so different contexts sharing their experiences.

Flipped Classroom versus Online Learning

Flipped classroom was a hot topic during the SECM workshop. It started with a paper by Nicolas Paez on A Flipped Classroom Experience Teaching Software Engineering, and continued with many exciting discussions throughout the day.

In parallel to the workshop, Hakan and I presented a paper at ICSE’17 on Flipping a Graduate-Level Software Engineering Foundations Course based on our experience co-designing and co-teaching the course over several semesters. In this blog, I would like to distill some of the tips from the paper, so others have the opportunity to discuss related experiences.

But before we start, let me share my suprise when I noticed that our ICSE paper on flipped classroom was part of a session called “Online learning”. Online learning?

Yes, true, in flipped classroom students have to watch videos “online” before coming to class. But the parallel with online education stops here. In fact, flipped classroom is the antithesis of online learning, in the sense that most of the learning happens within the classroom, where students come physically to perform in-class activities under the guidance of a faculty.

Most of the value of flipped classroom comes from immediate feedback that students receive when trying to solve a problem right in front of a faculty. Immediate feedback enables rapid and effective learning. It is specially important in fields like software engineering, where nothing is black or white, everything has nuances, and there are exceptions to pretty much every rule. In such a context, forget about having “robots” answering students’ questions online! And who wants to wait 24 hours for a human being to get back to a question posted online? The most effective way (that I know of) of creating short feedback loops and generating rapid and effective learning is with face-to-face interactions between students and faculty. This is what flipped classrooms are all about!

SECM 2017 took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina

The first workshop on Software Engineering Curricula for Millennials (SECM) was collocated with ICSE 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The full-day event took place on May 27 at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA) with Diego Fontdevila as the featured keynote speaker. Cécile and I would like to thank you for sharing your insights with everyone and making this first gathering a success! The collective experience and knowledge of the group were truly impressive. I have posted snapshots from the workshop on the web site (thanks for sending your photos to me). Also many thanks to PC members for reviewing the submissions and Nico Paez for helping with the local logistics.

Find the list of papers and workshop agenda on the SECM web site. You’ll also find a list of attendees and position slides from participants.

Here is a summary of the day by Nico Paez.

Our twitter tag was: #secm2017

This beautiful artwork was created on the fly by Nayla Portas during Diego Fontdevila’s keynote. Great job!

How shall we proceed next based on the action items collected at the end of the workshop? Some concrete suggestions were:

Establish a communication channel – done (Google group SE-EDU )
Refactor the workshop web site to get it ready for the next event and create a community web site for doing whatever we need to do in the interim – done (SECM 2017 is now served at subdomain secm2017.se-edu.org, and the domain se-edu.org points to this web site)
Invite others who might be interested in joining to grow the community (need suggestions)
Address a few of the high-priority topics that we did not get a chance to discuss at the workshop, perhaps via blogposts on this web site (more on this below)
Change the name of the workshop series before it becomes legacy to something everybody likes and is a bit less pedantic (e.g., SE Education for Millennials)
Create a draft agenda for next event (done thanks to Cécile, see this link)
Form a committee and submit a proposal to ICSE 2018 (ASAP)

Here is a list of high-priority topics identified at the workshop that could be addressed by attendees via blogposts on this web site:

Inverted curriculum (Nico P.)
Scaling up flipped classroom
Assessment and grading
Team formation
Teaching collaboration skills
Maintaining student attention, motivation
Replicating courses
Active learning (Hakan, observations from a recent CMU Eberly Center workshop)
Teaching skills / Book reviews (Diego, Nico P., perhaps a summary of classroom-tested strategies from the books mentioned at the workshop, including Teaching from the Back of the Room and Pedagogical Patterns)
Teaching as Research (TAR, basically running classroom studies to measure effectiveness of teaching strategies, Hakan)
Teaching ethics and sustainability in SE (Davide, Claudia)
Sustainable/holistic learning (Juraj, based on his Yoga & Human Development experience. Here is the movie he has shared with us in an email)