Evolving paper-based activities approach (EPAA) to promote interest in software engineering education

Abstract

Software engineering education is vital as an introductory course in computer science or information technology undergraduate programmes. However, it seems to be dull to some educators to teach the concepts as compared to teach courses like programming and database. This phenomenon causes educators to have lack of interest in teaching and in turn affect the interest of learners to grasp the concepts better and relate it with other courses in computer science or information technology. This paper proposes an evolving paper-based activities approach (EPAA) to promote interest in software engineering education among both educators and learners. The approach aims to make software engineering education to be more interesting, engaging and integrated so that learners can appreciate why they learn software engineering course in computer science or information technology programmes. Two groups of students who took the related courses gave the positive feedbacks that the approach increased their interest in learning software engineering mainly in understanding the concept in object-oriented analysis and design using Unified Modeling Language.