Serious Insights Through Fun Software-Projects

Abstract

Many universities are trying to convey practical experiences to students by conducting software projects. There are many variations of these projects but often the main focus is teaching programming skills and other technical aspects. Most often, the development process is neglected. Because of this, students often experience a ”shock of practice” because the industrial daily business depends on many non-technical problems and appropriate skills. These skills have not been taught in university very often and so companies must convey these skills to their new employees.

It would be a better solution if students could experience some or most of these aspects in their education. We think that not all of these can be experienced in the setting of a university. But some of these experiences can easily be made by students. In this paper we present our concepts for conveying these skills within a software project, including techniques like quality gates, walk-throughs and a time-voucher system to simulate the pressure of time in our software project. The project’s tasks are a careful mixture of funny and motivating yet very serious aspects. The first phase of the project has already attracted many students’ interest.