Abstract

The purpose of this research was to develop classroom project modules that supported students in developing an entrepreneurial mindset in the context of software engineering. The modules connect the software development life-cycle from beginning to end including user focused requirements elicitation and evaluating quality attributes. The modules were implemented in a junior level software engineering course, and three modules were surveyed in 2019 as part of a school-wide effort to embed entrepreneurial mindset into engineering curriculum. An IRB approved, student survey was developed and measured student perceptions of learning objectives that tie directly into ABET accreditation outcomes. Students reported they found the activities most helpful for designing, building, and testing real world systems.

The development of these modules was a component of increasing the process focus of the software engineering course by implementing a novel version of agile software development with active learning techniques. The practical experiments in this course taught from 2017 through 2021 allow us to report extensions and variants for adapting this design to existing software engineering courses at other universities. Among these variants we propose adopting class-wide teams which is atypical at other universities for junior-level project courses.

Qualitatively, we found that the student work completed in these modules to be higher quality than similar work submitted in prior years. Exam scores were improved when measuring students ability to create use cases, especially clarity and completeness. Student performance was greatly improved when writing use cases, especially clarity and completeness which was reflected in improved projects. Quantitatively, the same mindset objectives were assessed in other course modules as part a larger curriculum wide effort in Engineering. The numerical results indicate that the modules in this course outperformed other modules in the curriculum for most of the mindset objectives. Ultimately, the results indicate these types of modules may play an important role in entrepreneurial mindset development for computer science students.