Can we make software engineering education better by applying learning theories?

Today, software is being developed and maintained not just by engineers educated formally but also by people from widely different backgrounds including children, knowledge workers among many others. However, a number of studies indicate that most of these people are not equipped with enough software engineering skills leading to low-quality software. On the other hand, an analysis of literature reveals that the significant potential of learning theories (LTs) like Learning by Doing, Reflection, Model-based and so on has not been fully utilized by Software Engineering Education (SEE) and Training community. In this context, the main thrust of this poster is to emphasize the need for using vast amount of LTs (nearly 110) available to effectively and efficiently teach software engineering and help in producing quality software engineers. In this poster, we motivate the need for use of LTs in SEE, while summarizing significant ones and their use in SE. The poster also presents a mapping of key SE topics and their proposed LTs while emphasizing the role of context in using LTs. The poster further presents teaching Software Product Lines as an illustrative example. Finally, future work of this poster includes designing modeling languages to represent LTs and mapping them to topics in SWEBOK and GSwERC (software engineering curriculum) contributing to SEE community and Software Engineering at large.