SETMAT: A Representation Instrument for Software Engineering Teaching Practices

Software engineering (SE) teaching includes different strategies such as project-based learning, collaborative learning, simulations, and case methods, among others, seeking to balance theory and practice and encourage teamwork. However, although some repositories of teaching practices are identified, each SE teacher incorporates different strategies/practices either barely documented or subjectively represented. The latter hinders the transfer of knowledge among the software engineering education community. Therefore, in this paper we propose SETMAT (Software Engineering Teaching Methods and Theory), a descriptive theory of SE education offering a common conceptual framework for representing software engineering teaching practices, and we also describe a pilot with teachers from Colombia, Chile, and Mexico where they represented and socialized their SE teaching practices in SETMAT. This pilot proves the usage of SETMAT for representing teaching practices easies comparison, composition, and transferring such practices. This poses an input of interest for SE education.