Software development as service to the student community: An experiential and high student involvement approach to software engineering education

While a common expression of experiential learning in software engineering is the industry-sponsored project, it suffers from key shortcomings at the introductory level. These center on the fact that projects are neither drawn from nor relevant to the everyday lives and communities of their student-developers. To address these challenges, we focus on casting project development in terms of service to the student community, with the involvement of our university's ACM Student Chapter. We discuss the pedagogical foundations of our work, present specific course organization issues, expand on a number of specific challenges with our approach, offer concrete project examples, and outline future work and evaluation.