DREE 2022

Welcome to the First International Workshop on..

Designing and Running Project-Based Courses in Software Engineering Education (DREE)

Software engineering courses should prepare students for industrial careers. Ideally, students should work with industrial-scale projects that are being actively developed. Unfortunately, implementing this in the context of a course can be challenging, and so many courses only work with greenfield projects, shielding students from the complexity and scale they are likely to encounter in industry. The few courses that do utilize real-world software often work with older projects, and once projects have been used once, solutions begin to appear online.

In spite of these myriad challenges, software engineering educators often do manage to design and run engaging, project-based courses where students develop the skills that are necessary for the industry. The purpose of this workshop is to learn from the hard-fought lessons of these project-based courses, reflecting upon successes and challenges faced in our daily struggle to prepare the next generation.

In this workshop, we solicit experience papers, detailing the experience learned during a single class iteration, technique papers, describing the strategies used to create engaging project across multiple years, and scaffolding papers, focusing on giving students the necessary support they need to be successful in a project-based course.

After each paper session the workshop will be broken down into small groups. These groups will be tasked with synthesizing what has been learned from the presentations thus far, and what is known to work from the group members’ own experience. For the first small group session the emphasis will be on collecting and describing the lessons learned and for the second small group session the emphasis will be on collecting and describing best practices.

The output of these sessions will be carefully collected by the workshop organizers. It will be used to create a workshop report that will become publicly available shortly after the workshop. If the contents warrant it, this report may be submitted to an upcoming education conference as a many-authored paper, using evidence from several of the submitted projects to support a larger lesson or best practice. This outcome-based approach focuses this workshop on being a working venue, not just a mini-conference.

How to submit

See “Call for Papers” tab.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

The purpose of our workshop will be to collect and learn from the lessons of practicing software engineering educators. We solicit three types of four-page papers, listed below. However, we would like to emphasize that this workshop strongly encourages the open, or semi-open (to keep answers from being circulated to students) sharing of project materials across universities and courses. Participants should, in addition to these paper submissions, be prepared to bring supporting material including source code repositories, pre-configured virtual machines, assignment handouts, project rubrics, etc.

To describe their experience with project-based courses, we invite the following types of papers:

1. Experience papers, detailing the experience learned during a single class iteration,
2. Technique papers, describing the strategies used to create engaging projects across multiple years,
3. Scaffolding papers, focusing on giving students the necessary support they need to be successful in a project-based course.
4. Problem papers, a one page paper describing an open problem in SE education, that can be used to generate discussion for the community.

Note that all papers will need to be grounded in practice; all papers must include at least some data from a recent semester. Again, we would like to emphasize that successful papers should include or reference extensive supporting materials including access to the project, project assignments, and project assessments. Furthermore, authors are expected to describe their learning objectives for course projects as well as the metrics and best practices used for gauging student learning outcomes. Authors are also encouraged to perform a cost-effectiveness analysis and the long-term sustainability of their instructional practices in terms of effort. They are encouraged to perform an analysis of the suitability of transferring their own successful course projects to other instructors or institutions.

Submission Information

ICSE 2022 workshop proceedings will be prepared by IEEE CPS and published by ACM. Thus, workshop papers must follow the ACM formatting instructions . In other words, all authors should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, as can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page . LaTeX users should use the sigconf option and well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) option. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}
\acmConference[Q-SE 2022]{The 1st International Workshop on Designing and Running Project-Based Courses in Software Engineering Education (DREE)}{May ??-??, 2022}{Pittsburgh, PA, USA}

• All submissions must not exceed 4 pages, including main text, figures, tables, appendices, with up to one additional page containing only references.
• The DREE 2022 workshop will not employ a double-anonymous review process. Authors should not attempt to hide their identities from reviewers. We solicit papers that discuss the authors’ detailed experiences designing and running project-based courses, and imagine that many submissions will (necessarily) include identify-revealing details such as course structure, overall curriculum, and links to supplemental material.
• All submissions must be in PDF.
• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM formatting instructions. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.
• By submitting to the DREE workshop, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ . In particular, papers submitted to DREE 2022 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for DREE 2022. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.
• By submitting to the DREE workshop, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE .
• The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2022. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Papers can be submitted at https://dree22.hotcrp.com/