Ray Bareiss

A story-centered, learn-by-doing approach to software engineering education

Carnegie Mellons West Coast Campus offers an MS in Software Engineering, with technical and development management tracks, targeted at working software professionals in Silicon Valley. We believe the program to be unique in that it is entirely team-based and project-centered. Students learn by doing as they are coached just in time by faculty in the context of authentic projects, and they are evaluated based on what they produce. Student satisfaction is high: 92% believe that the program has given them a competitive advantage with respect to their professional peers, and their promotion and salary histories bear out this belief.

An exploration of knowledge and skills transfer from a formal software engineering curriculum to a capstone practicum project

Students at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley complete a team-based practicum project for an industrial sponsor as the capstone of their masters education in software engineering. Over time, the faculty member who typically serves as advisor for such projects has been disturbed by the failure of several student teams to transfer some relevant knowledge and skills from the formal curriculum to the relatively unstructured practicum project environment. We conducted a survey of all 2010 software engineering students to ascertain the most significant self-reported shortcomings. This paper presents the survey data and then discusses the results in terms of a theory of transfer; as part of this discussion recent and possible future changes to instruction are identified.

Coaching via cognitive apprenticeship

At Carnegie Mellons Silicon Valley campus we employ a learn-by-doing educational approach in which nearly all student learning, and thus instruction, is in the context of realistic, team-based projects. Consequently, we have adopted coaching as our predominant teaching model. In this paper we reflect on our experience with the nature of teaching by coaching using a framework derived from Cognitive Apprenticeship, and explain how we employ the techniques it suggests in our teaching. We also discuss a range of instructional tensions that arise in teaching by coaching and present a survey of student attitudes regarding the effectiveness of our approach.

A wizard of oz tool for android

Although mobile-based prototyping platforms are numerous, there are currently no tools that support Wizard of Oz interactions on Android. This paper describes a Wizard of Oz prototyping system for Android, via which a designer can enhance digitally generated mock-ups or scanned-in paper sketches with interactive widgets and automated screen transitions. Screen transitions can be based on user action such as a button presses, triggered manually by an experimenter observing from a laptop or triggered based on the users location or the time. We have integrated scenario-based user testing, a context in which Wizard of Oz testing is often used, by providing support for location- and time-based display of videos and screens in the prototype. It is our hope that this system will find wider use in the design community.

Semantic Geotagging: A Location-Based Hypermedia Approach to Creating Situational Awareness

As emergency first responders and commanders increasingly use mobile phones, tablets, and social media to communicate, coordinate, and manage information during disasters, we see a need and opportunity to provide a mobile device-appropriate semantic layer to a geographically-based common operating picture. The challenge is to provide a simple, usable structure for a rapidly growing body of information to simplify the development of situational awareness in an unfolding disaster. We use a hyperlinked structure based on the ASK model to organize information in a readily accessible form. In this paper we describe our initial design and experience with an Android-based prototype, supported by a Ruby on Rails-based repository service. Our prototype allows the incorporation, aggregation, assessment, and redistribution of dynamic human-generated and sensor-derived information.

A Graduate Education in Software Management and the Software Business for Mid-Career Professionals

Given the unique nature of the software business, the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley campus concluded that mid-career software professionals would be better served by a tailored master’s degree focusing on software management and more broadly on the business of software than by a typical MBA. Our software management master’s program integrates business, technical, and soft skills to prepare our students for technical leadership in their current companies or in entrepreneurial ventures. Our initial program built on the strengths of Carnegie Mellon’s world-class software engineering education. We targeted students working in large companies, engaged in large-scale enterprise software projects, employing “high ceremony” software development processes. However, the majority of our students came from Silicon Valley companies which shared a product development focus, engaged in smaller projects, favored agile development processes, and measured development cycles in weeks rather than years. Our program has evolved to align with these interests. It employs a unique team-based and project-based pedagogy which emphasizes practical skills over theory, depth over breadth, and coaching over lecturing. High student satisfaction and growing enrollment have validated our curriculum decisions and have led us to make this program the educational centerpiece of Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley campus

Meeting the challenge of software engineering education for working professionals in the 21st century

Software engineering education for working professionals remains a challenge from the perspective of determining relevant content; identifying effective methods for delivery; and maintaining the focus and motivation of students. This panel brings together academic and industry professionals to share their perspectives and experiences. Anticipated points for discussion include: education/training delivery strategies, curriculum definition, certification challenges, marketing issues, collaboration strategies to engage industry sponsorship, value assessments for students and sponsoring organizations, and program success stories. This will be a highly interactive panel and the audience should come prepared to both ask and answer questions.

Every curriculum tells a story

The fallacy that many post-secondary curricula are optimized to facilitate student learning is exposed by a parable of creating a curriculum to teach dragon slaying. As an alternative model, the story-centered curriculum is introduced and an example of using this approach to redesign an e-commerce masters program is presented. Examples of the story-centered curriculum being used in both masters-level and high school are described.

Mobile Training in the Real World for Community Disaster Responders

This paper describes the design and initial evaluation of a mobile application for training Community Emergency Response Teams. Our goal is to model the kind of remediation and performance support provided in high-end eLearning systems, and provide it during hands-on learning in the real world, using mobile phones and sensors embedded in the environment. Thus far we have designed the learning system and tested it with real users, simulating sensor-based activity recognition using an Android-based Wizard of Oz system that we have developed. Our initial user tests found that users were able to use the system to complete tasks, including some that they had never done before. They had little difficulty understanding the interaction mechanism, and overall reacted positively to the system. Though learner reaction was generally positive, these user tests yielded important feedback about ways we can better manage the division between the real world and the digital world.

A Gentle Introduction to Learn by Doing

We believe the masters program in Software Engineering offered by Carnegie Mellon Universitys Silicon Valley Campus to be unique in that it is entirely team-based and project-centered [1]. Students learn by doing as they are coached just in time by faculty in the context of authentic projects, and they are evaluated on the work they produce. Student satisfaction is high: 94% believe that the program has given them a competitive advantage with respect to their professional peers, and their promotion and salary histories bear out this belief. This tutorial introduces the attendees to our learn-by-doing instructional approach through participation in a learn by doing experience, performing a usability analysis of a commercial website, followed by discussion to highlight what we believe to be important principles of teaching by coaching.