Prototyping a Software Engineering Educational Community

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton FL

Investigators

Abstract

Software Engineering (34) This project establishes an active and productive software engineering education community in which universities will cooperate to share ideas, artifacts, materials and experience. As a proof-of-concept project, it prototypes such a community to evaluate the feasibility of the idea by establishing joint activities in this area between Florida Atlantic University and the University of Virginia. To achieve the stated goal of providing educational experiences in software engineering to undergraduate students in order to better prepare them to develop large and complex systems in industry and government, the project is seeking better ways to allow educators to collaborative develop and test educational materials. The focus is on community building by a) developing curricular materials and techniques for sharing them and b) developing methods whereby expensive hardware components can be shared across the internet, thus improving accessibility of such equipment to more students. Existing teaching artifacts at both universities are being studied to see how they can be successfully adapted for use by other members of the software engineering education community. Existing classroom artifacts and exercises previously developed by the PI's will be enhanced for shared use. Mobile robot hardware and software configurations used at the University of Virginia will be modified so that students at Florida Atlantic University an develop software to operate the robots remotely over the network. Similar experiments with networked video cameras (webcams) are being used in software development courses at both universities. This project builds upon an existing collaboration between the two universities to help determine how multi-institution efforts can be expanded to make a national impact. It directly addresses the themes of faculty development and the integration of new technologies into undergraduate education.