Preliminary results of an NSF-sponsored software engineering pedagogical laboratory

Five experiments were proposed to the US National Science Foundation: functional decomposition; optimization random-basis testing; software retrieval for reuse; and expert language translation. The purpose of these experiments was to make the study of software engineering cohesive, interesting and, hopefully, fun for the students. They were to learn software engineering principles by doing rather than by memorizing definitions from a course text. Preliminary results evidence that while such learning constitutes effective job training and serves as a basis for further research, it needs to be carefully crafted with regard to student preparation.