Activity based teaching learning in software engineering - An experience

The course on Software Engineering is important for both the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of computer science. This is particularly so in terms of making the students industry ready by exposing them to the processes and practices of life cycle activities of software development. The traditional approach to teaching the course on Software Engineering has not been able to make a positive impact on learning because: the course instructors mostly lack exposure to industry practices, the course material being referred while teaching the course fails to establish the context as the case studies referred are alien to the students and assessment focusing mainly on memory oriented questions. Thus teaching the course on Software Engineering has got reduced to monotonous lecturing, in the absence of experience and case studies. An attempt to address the issues referred above is made by the authors. The theory course on Software Engineering was redesigned by tightly coupling a Mini project course with it. Different activities are designed along with Class room teaching to make Software Engineering as joyful course for the students. The proposed methodology helped the students to improve their Software Engineering concepts and quality of capstone projects. The paper discusses the approach followed, the results obtained and the experience gained.