Communications of the ACM
Learning Software Development — By Developing Software
Working on real development projects imparts practical skills that are difficult to acquire in a conventional classroom setting, says Ted Benson, co-creator of MIT's software development class.
Credit: MIT News
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is offering a new course that involves students in large, ongoing, open source software development projects with assistance from industry professionals. As in real-world software development, students work online with geographically-dispersed partners, who are students from about 15 universities worldwide.
The concept originated with Stanford University computer science lecturer Jay Borenstein, who obtained funding from Facebook, and formed a working group of educators to create courses and other educational initiatives around development projects. Borenstein also collaborated with members of the open source software community to determine which problems should be addressed, and recruited industry mentors.
Working on actual development projects helps students acquire practical skills and engages students in a way that traditional courses do not. The course offers some lectures tailored to individual programming work, but students primarily work with one another. When a section of code is complete, students log it into the open source project's online code repository, where it is reviewed. This level of individual attention is possible because the course only has 11 students, but MIT is considering ways to scale the class up.
From MIT News
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