An Athletic Approach to Software Engineering Education

We present our findings after two years of experience involving three instructors using an "athletic" approach to software engineering education (AthSE). Co-author Johnson developed AthSE in 2013 to address issues he experienced teaching graduate and undergraduate software engineering. Co-authors Port and Hill subsequently adapted the original approach to their own software courses. AthSE is a pedagogy in which the course is organized into a series of skills to be mastered. For each skill, students are given practice "Workouts" along with videos showing the instructor performing the Workout both correctly and quickly. Unlike traditional home-work assignments, students are advised to repeat the Workout not only until they can complete it correctly, but also as quickly as the instructor. In this experience report we investigate the following question: how can software engineering education be redesigned as an athletic endeavor, and will this provide more efficient and effective learning among students and more rapidly lead them to greater competency and confidence?