Student Engagement in Active Learning Software Engineering Courses

Engineering instructors often rely on lectures as their primary mode of instruction even in project courses. In the lecture mode of instruction student engagement with the course material is often low or non-existent until the date of an assessment activity (assignment or exam) is near. In passive learning environments students often do not get many opportunities to develop their soft skills. Many engineering educators regard experiential learning as a better way to train the next generation of software engineers to do project work. This paper describes the authors' experiences introducing active learning opportunities in a junior level software engineering course and a senior level game design course. The materials created for these courses were developed using a variation of the ADDIE (analyze, design, development, implementation, evaluation) process model. The team created a mix of case-study review, role play, trigger videos, and hands-on exercises involving work with software engineering artifacts or tools to facilitate coverage of the topics. The investigators collected observational data on student engagement while they were involved in various class activities and found that they were least engaged when listening to even short lectures. Student feedback and the authors' own lessons learned are being used to plan the next iterations of these courses.