Augmenting teamwork skills through Web3D technologies in software engineering course

With the rapid pace of the computer and information development, software projects are becoming increasingly complicated. Teamwork and soft skills are especially important in software engineering and computer programming, where projects are general too strenuous for individuals to accomplish and effective teamwork is vital for efficient completion of the projects. However, these soft skills, such as collaboration, communication ability, expressing power, speaking ability, socio-cultural, independent responsibilities and collision resolution, are just very difficult to teach and learn because of the students´ passive role in traditional course. The PTBL learning model combines with Web3D technologies to augment the teamwork skills in software engineering. The PTBL model which is based on Problem-Based Learning and Task-Based Learning has been targeted to overcome common limitations of the traditional course for soft skills. This paper also presents two course based on the PTBL learning model, as well as the experimental results obtained from the courses of the two case studies in software engineering course.