Building Teamwork To Engage Students

Abstract

Through action research I inquired into my pedagogical practice, where one of the research questions I asked was: How do I build teamwork within a Software Engineering Curriculum to engage students? (Russell, 2021). I addressed the issue of integrating teamwork into my practice over two academic years as I taught an Agile Methodologies curriculum to two different cohort of students studying for a Level 8 Bachelor of Engineering (Software) degree. Each cohort consisted of a range of nationalities and cultures. The majority were from Ireland and China but the classes also comprised of students from Eastern Europe and India. The Scrum Team Agile software development is a process to create software products. A key component of this methodology is the concept of the ‘scrum team’ (Ashmore and Runyan, 2015, p.84) comprised of a group of 4 to 7 software engineers who have ultimate responsibility for building a software product. I took action to transform my practice to enact team-work based on the concept of the Scrum Team to: provide students critical experience relevant to their future careers, [and] to set problems of greater scale and complexity than could be tackled individually, and [which] are a vehicle for socially constructed learning. (Neill, DeFranco and Sangwan, 2017, p.591)