Soft skills (e.g., communication, collaboration, problem-solving, etc.) are crucial for computer scientists, due to high demand from employers.
However, teaching those soft skills is challenging. First, to effectively acquire soft skills, students must train them, in combination with their hard skills, in an engaging learning environment. Second, students need to receive feedback on what they are doing. In particular, that feedback should be based on specific assessment criteria, in order to reinforce students’ learning towards soft skills acquisition. Finally, because educational teams are usually overloaded, a new pedagogical approach must not be too time-consuming to implement.
We deal with those challenges with the Collaborative Design & Build (CDB) activity. From the educational team perspective, CDB is scalable. Whatever the number of participants, it takes about two days to prepare. During the activity, the instructors act as facilitators, making students the owners of their learning. This activity aims at simulating in the classroom how actual projects are carried out in the industry. This connection to their future careers reinforces students’ motivation. Similar to the industry, CDB requires students to use both their hard and soft skills to solve problems in teams, with each team responsible for a specific task, such as analysis or testing. In practice, as illustrated above, CDB employs an assembly-line process, where problem solving is conducted through two distinct phases: the design phase followed by the building phase. Each phase may include one or more steps. Student teams are sequentially responsible for solving a problem at a given step within a specific timeframe. The current solution is then passed on to the next team for review based on specific assessment criteria. After validation, the solution is taken over to the next step.