@inproceedings{179728eab2b5423eb326c28d4ed09b82,
title = "Experience Report on Soft and Project Skills Building through Repetition",
abstract = "Acquiring soft and project skills during their studies is of paramount importance for computer science students to integrate large development teams after graduating. Project-oriented learning offers interesting opportunities for teachers to tutor students, and allows them to acquire and train those skills in addition to the core topics of the course. However, since most existing curricula require courses to be as independent as possible (for organizational reasons for instance), some topics are covered in different courses in slightly different ways. This repetition is interesting for understanding difficult notions appropriately, but may also hamper students' understanding when closely related concepts are embedded in different ways. We report here on our teaching approach: we propose a series of projects that share a common theme, in order to (i) provide a transversal understanding of common notions seen in separate courses, and (ii) introduce soft and project skills in a progressive way, enabling students to iteratively experience and learn skills that are necessary for professional life. We report on the results of interviews conducted with the students and extract valuable lessons for reproducing this approach in different curricula.",
keywords = "software engineering education, project skills, soft skills",
author = "Xavier Devroey and Moussa Amrani and Benoit Vanderose",
note = "Funding Information: We would like to thank Fenia Aivaloglou for her valuable feedback on an earlier version of the paper, and Fanny Boraita Amador for handling the interviews with the students. Xavier Devroey is partially funded by the EU Project STAMP ICT-16-10 No.731529 and the Vici “TestShift” project (No. VI.C.182.032) from the Dutch Science Foundation NWO. Moussa Amrani is partially funded by the D-Dams SkyWin Competitivity Cluster Project of the Walloon Region. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 Owner/Author.",
year = "2021",
month = aug,
day = "23",
doi = "10.1145/3472673.3473959",
language = "English",
series = "EASEAI 2021 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Education through Advanced Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, co-located with ESEC/FSE 2021",
publisher = "ACM Press",
pages = "9--14",
editor = "Andreea Vescan and Camelia Serban and Julie Henry and Upsorn Praphamontripong",
booktitle = "EASEAI 2021 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Education through Advanced Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, co-located with ESEC/FSE 2021",
address = "United States",
}