Passing Down the Pain: Difficulties in Teaching Software Development
Ivan Zarea • Potsdam, Germany • Talk

Date: August 01, 2015
Published: August 13, 2015
Announced: November 17, 2014

Passing Down the Pain: Difficulties in Teaching Software Development by Ivan Zarea

How do you teach proper software engineering? How do you design a teaching program that highlights the pain of maintaining software to students who have never actually had to maintain software? And, while doing that, how do you keep your students engaged?

Teaching at an experimental group at the Technical University of Moldova, I’m able to employ new techniques including testing, live coding and software maintenance into a regular university curriculum.

Some of the techniques work well to convey the difficulties of writing software, others were failed experiments involving chinchillas and drug dealers. It’s a different age for teaching. The students have already had experience with hackathons, code camps, fancy javascript frameworks and it’s our mission as educators to stay relevant and provide engaging material. I believe that we can leverage the new tools and drastically improve the way we teach software development.

eurucamp 2015