A practical software engineering course with distributed teams

Traditional didactical methods with a strong teacher-centred approach have proved to be inadequate for software engineering education as they do not capture the complexity of the software production process. Our paper demonstrates that software engineering can and should be taught in an authentic learning environment that relies heavily on a student-centred teaching approach. We present our experiences with an example of a practical software engineering course that simulates a real-world software engineering project carried out in distributed teams. This concept has been tried out and improved based on continuous feedback from students and professionals over the past four years. The proposed mixture of different pedagogical concepts (constructivism, experiential and collaborative learning), that also reflect certain agile software development practices, has significantly improved the quality of software engineering education.