Teaching Computer Science Students to Communicate Scientific Findings More Effectively

Abstract

Science communication forms the bridge between computer science researchers and their target audience. Researchers who can effectively draw attention to their research findings and communicate them comprehensibly not only help their target audience to actually learn something, but also benefit themselves from the increased visibility of their work and person. However, the necessary skills for good science communication must also be taught, and this has so far been neglected in the field of software engineering education. We therefore designed and implemented a science communication seminar for bachelor students of computer science curricula. Students take the position of a researcher who, shortly after publication, is faced with having to draw attention to the paper and effectively communicate the contents of the paper to one or more target audiences. Based on this scenario, each student develops a communication strategy for an already published software engineering research paper and tests the resulting ideas with the other seminar participants. We explain our design decisions for the seminar, and combine our experiences with responses to a participant survey into lessons learned. With this experience report, we intend to motivate and enable other lecturers to offer a similar seminar at their university. Collectively, university lecturers can prepare the next generation of computer science researchers to not only be experts in their field, but also to communicate research findings more effectively.