Designing interactive workshops for software engineering educators

Abstract

Given the rapid pace of changes in the software industry, software engineering educators face the challenge of keeping up with emerging trends and technology and incorporating them into the classroom. Among other tools at their disposal, educators leverage software engineering education workshops to share knowledge and experiences, and hence further their own education. Unfortunately, information available to educators on how to run and organize these workshops is scarce. This paper is an attempt to fill the gap by sharing lessons learned. It is based on the authors’ experience designing, facilitating, and participating in such workshops, an interview with a workshop organizer, and an exploration of software engineering education workshop websites. The paper documents the current state of software engineering education workshops, identifies workshop design challenges—including interactivity of the format—and proposes solutions to address the challenges.