Teaching Software Engineering (**** draft ****)

"-- lessons from MIT
by Hal Abelson (http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~hal/) and Philip Greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com)

Presented at the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference (Hong Kong), May 1-5, 2001.

Abstract
This is a report on what we've learned during the first four semesters of teaching a new subject at MIT: Software Engineering of Innovative Internet Applications. We present new ideas in teaching computer science students to build the kinds of applications demanded by society. We discuss methods for involving alumni as teaching assistants and coaches. We argue for the method of helping students achieve fluency by assigning five complete applications for construction in a semester rather than the traditional single problem in a software engineering semester. "

Philip Greenspun has also (e-)published the textbook for this course:Preface

"This is the textbook for the MIT course "Software Enginering for Internet Applications". The course is intended for juniors and seniors in computer science. We assume that they know how to write a computer program and debug it. We do not assume knowledge of any particular programming languages, standards, or protocols. The most concise statement of the course goal is that "The student finishes knowing how to build amazon.com by him or herself." "