Enhancing software engineering education: a creative approach

Research in software engineering (SE) shows that freshly graduated students are usually not prepared to deal with problems occurring at the workplace. It is important to teach them how to construct the knowledge and solve the problems faced with. In this paper, we present two approaches used in SE courses at the University of Zagreb, Croatia: One approach is a distributed project-based course, where students from Croatia and Sweden work on the projects together, going through the whole life-cycle of creating a software product, while solving different problems, from technical obstacles to handling cultural differences. The other approach focuses on self-constructing the knowledge and presenting it to other students, with students' discussions and a group project in the end of the course. Both approaches enable the practicing of soft skills which in most cases are not adequately represented in SE education.