Scaling up: How Thirty-two Students Collaborated and Succeeded in Developing a Prototype Software Design Environment

Virtually all software engineering courses employ class projects in which students practice their newly-learned skills. By necessity, these projects tend to be of a small scale. In efforts to better educate students in the many aspects and pitfalls of the software process, different alternatives have been tried over time. In this paper, we describe one such experience in which we put all thirty-two students in the course on a single, large project and gave them the open-ended task of building a prototype of "a better software design environment. " This lead to a completely new set of dynamics and interesting opportunities to teach topics that normally would not be covered or illustrated by students' experiences in a regular software project. We introduce our course design, present its progression over the quarter, illustrate its strengths and weaknesses, and discuss critical factors for its repeatability