14th SEI Software Engineering Workshop for Educators Set for August 1-3
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March 3, 2017—The 14th SEI Software Engineering Workshop for Educators will take place August 1-3, 2017, at the SEI’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, headquarters. The workshop fosters an exchange of ideas among educators whose curricula include subjects spanning software engineering.
Formerly called the Architecture-Centric Engineering Workshop, this event broadened its scope last year to encompass the entire field of software engineering. In keeping with the SEI tradition for this workshop, the event is free of charge and open to any accredited, college-level educator.
Facilitating this year’s workshop are the SEI’s Grace Lewis and Robert Nord. Lewis is deputy lead of the SEI's Advanced Mobile Systems initiative and principal investigator for the Tactical Computing and Communications research project. Her interests include mobile computing, cloud computing, software architecture, and service-oriented architecture. Nord conducts research in the areas of software architecture, agile at scale, and technical debt. He is a coauthor of the books Applied Software Architecture and Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond.
“Expanding the scope of the workshop to software engineering was a big plus last year,” said Lewis. “We had a greater variety of software engineering educators and also much deeper discussions during the group sessions that highlighted how difficult it is to teach such a broad and important topic in one or two courses. Some of the educators are super creative about it and were happy to share with others what they do.”
The three-day workshop will feature two days of SEI courses. This year’s courses cover design guidelines and patterns for microservices and cost estimation. Day three is devoted to invited talks and group sessions, facilitated by SEI team members, where participants share experiences, ideas, and tangible artifacts for introducing software engineering topics into the college curriculum.
“An ongoing challenge discussed by the educators is how to help students relate abstract concepts to real problems,” said Nord. “The instructors for the SEI courses have extensive industry experience to share and include exercises, a hands-on design lab, and gamification techniques in their courses to engage students in active learning.”
Roger Champagne of École de Technologie Supérieure in Montreal, Canada, attended the workshop last year. “I cannot emphasize enough the value of the exchanges with colleagues from all over the USA and the rest of the world during the third day but also during breaks and social events,” said Champage. “We have too few opportunities to gather and exchange during such events, and I am forever grateful to the SEI for holding this workshop for thirteen years. I hope the tradition lives for long years to come.”
The workshop is open to any accredited, college-level educator. In lieu of an entry fee, attendees are expected to bring a shareable artifact to the workshop.
