Prove me wrong! How debating becomes the secret weapon to teach ICT students innovation and entrepreneurship

Abstract

Non-technical skills are now more relevant than ever for students in ICT. Many ICT degree curricula, however, still do not include non-technical education. Furthermore, even when non-technical courses are included, they are extremely compressed in time, and students have a low interest for these subjects. Teachers, as a consequence, face the aggravated challenge of carrying out their task in a context of generally low motivation. In this contribution, we present a novel debatebased teaching method called Technology Battles. We illustrate the theoretical, pedagogical and practical elements that led us to the design of Technology Battles, and discuss some preliminary results. These first results suggest that our teaching method was able to make the course's subject-matter more appealing to otherwise uninterested students, and bridge their initial negative bias. While some limitations remain in the ability to measure the obtained results objectively, we think debates might be a viable tool to introduce ICT students to the ambiguous nature of the socio-economic and ethical impacts of the technologies they work with.