Experience from a course aiming at understanding system development with focus on system design and integration

From a number of case studies in industry we have learned that the ability to learn new things is more important than the ability to remember facts and that the ability to question and to discover new trends is more important than the ability to follow detailed instructions. So we have tried to design a programming project course supporting the development of new skills or capabilities, but without losing any of the traditional technical contents: distributed systems, computer networking, and client-server architectures together with object-oriented programming. We have used situations where the students have an initial understanding like modeling the facilities of a typical hotel. The student group develops a game-like system with a central information server keeping track of all the objects of the system and their states. The other subsystems are client programs modeling bars, escalators, gyms, gift-shops etc. Experience from different approaches during four years is presented.