A new approach to collaborative learning in software engineering focussed on embedded systems

Software Engineering is a very complex and abstract process and therefore hard to learn and hard to teach. Especially in mechatronics software engineering is not the main focus of the university studies. Therefore students have little understanding and low motivation to spend time on it. In this paper, we share some experiences on how we tried to give students a deeper understanding for software engineering, its processes and the complexity of software engineering projects. To that end, we chose a new didactical approach consisting of direct instruction and activating learning styles in parallel. The classical lectures were supplemented by a seminar and a project phase to allow students to apply their theoretical learned knowledge without delay in realistic settings. We combined active and passive learning styles to give students the opportunity to consolidate factual knowledge, foster soft skills (e.g. presentation and communication skills), improve team work and gain a deeper understanding of software engineering processes. The experiences of our courses in summer semesters 2010 and 2012 lead to a further development of our didactical approach in 2013. As a consequence, we tried further methods to spread needed information across the student working groups by using a wiki-system, a market of knowledge or mixing the groups between seminar and project phase. At the end of the seminar phase quality gates were implemented and also awards at the end of the project phase. Systematically evaluations at the end of the seminar phase and at the end of the project work show the learning outcomes and possible further improvements of our didactical approach.