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Session Description

Ticketed event: $30.00
Service learning is a high-impact teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection. In software engineering education, service-learning experiences can enrich student learning, foster civic responsibility, and illustrate the professional role in contributing to the common good. Research has shown that service-learning projects can significantly boost student interest in computing careers, particularly among female and minority students.

For educators and institutions, however, adopting service-learning projects within existing courses presents challenges: How can projects be embedded into the curriculum without adding new courses? How can instructors provide formative feedback and assess student work effectively? How can instructors collaborate with project partners to ensure a project’s feasibility and, ultimately, its success? Without established resources or infrastructure, many institutions lack the support to adopt these impactful experiences.

This workshop introduces our Scaffolded Projects for the Social Good (SPSG) approach, which enables instructors to integrate service-learning projects into courses using a studio model. In SPSG, projects are developed across one or more semesters, passing between teams and benefiting from continuous formative feedback facilitated by rubrics. The model emphasizes key elements, including strong collaboration among students, instructors, and community partners; active involvement of project partners throughout the project lifecycle; and detailed feedback that helps students improve deliverables iteratively.

In this workshop, participants will be guided through each phase of an SPSG project using a hands-on, mock-up case study. They will begin with a project feasibility assessment, where they will engage in structured questions to facilitate meaningful discussions with hypothetical project partners and collaboratively score project suitability. This will include identifying potential risks to the learning outcomes of a class, along with strategies for effectively communicating these risks and collaboratively developing approaches to mitigate them with community partners. Participants will then experience the team formation process, establishing a team agreement to set expectations, followed by simulated client interviews to help students build and refine a product backlog. The workshop will also cover sprint evaluations, where participants apply rubrics to provide actionable feedback on mock sprint deliverables. Finally, participants will explore the knowledge transfer process that enables a seamless project transition from one student team to another.

Below is the planned schedule for the workshop:
10m - Introduction to SPSG
20m - Project feasibility assessment
20m - Team formation
20m - Simulated client interviews
20m - Sprint evaluations
20m - Knowledge transfer
20m - Open discussion
10m - Wrap up

This workshop is based on the successful practices of CCSU’s Software Engineering Studio, which since 2014 has completed over 65 projects for non-profits and community organizations and engaged more than 500 students. By the end of this session, participants will leave with practical tools, rubrics, and a scalable framework for implementing service learning in their programs, enabling students to develop technical skills while making meaningful contributions to their communities.

Moderated by

1. Dr. Stan Kurkovsky

Speaker

1. Dr. Stan Kurkovsky

   Central Connecticut State University

   Dr. Stan Kurkovsky is a Professor of Computer Science at Central Connecticut State University. He received his PhD from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette in 1999 and has been serving as a faculty member since then. Dr. Kurkovsky served and continues to serve as a PI on a number of NSF-sponsored projects, including four S-STEM grants, three IUSE grants, and an REU Site grant. He also received funding from NIH, NSA, and ACM. He has an established record of over 90 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of software engineering, mobile computing, and computer science education.