Interdisciplinary system courses - teaching agile systems engineering

Abstract

With the advent of technologies like the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 and Cyber-Physical Systems, many software engineering courses turn into system engineering courses. Recent advances in technologies such as 3D printing and low-cost micro controllers enable to teach agile hard- and software co-design in system engineering courses. In this paper, we describe Interdisciplinary System Courses (ISC) - a teaching approach based on interdisciplinary projects, light-weight agile techniques and solving real problems by integrating industry customers. We describe our experiences from an exploratory case study where we applied ISC in a two-week international summer school with a customer from the aerospace industry. We derive a set of hypotheses on the effects of ISC.