Using Non-Profit Partners to Engage Students in RE

To improve requirements engineering education and training, experience reports serve as guidance on how courses can be taught and which methods and approaches work with specific types of audiences. One problem when teaching undergraduate audiences is often a lack in motivation for the course because of misconceptions about requirements engineering as well as simple work overload by the curricula or other imposing constraints with regard to the students’ time budget. A way to overcome this motivational problem and to make students want to actively contribute to a requirements engineering class project is to let them perform a case study on a socially relevant system in collaboration with an industrial partner. This paper provides an experience report of such an in-class project on an online-learning platform for civic engagement in cooperation with the Story of Stuff Project. We provide the structure of the course as well as the assignments, excerpts from the students’ results, and observations made throughout the course, all of which may serve as input for other instructors.