In interactive instruction, learning is enhanced through social interaction. Communication is key in this type of instruction: between the teacher and the students, as well as between students, without the direct participation of the instructor. In software engineering instruction, one of the many challenges is making students face situations similar to those in real life, with the goal of preparing them for their future work as software engineers. Whereas the traditional style of lecturing is still largely used in this field, hands-on, practical and interactive approaches have repeatedly proven to be more effective. This short paper is based on the experience of using such a teaching approach in a multicultural software engineering classroom, by considering the additional challenges brought by interacting with colleagues from different cultural backgrounds and speaking in a common, foreign language. The strategies employed throughout the course will be highlighted, along with various lessons learned, to be integrated in future software engineering classes.

Nowadays, employers highly value soft skills, yet many students lack these fundamental abilities. Teaching soft skills involves fostering active student participation and facilitating communication of technical knowledge among peers. This approach presents challenges: (i) creating an engaging learning environment; (ii) ensuring students get timely feedback; (iii) finding an approach that is not too time-consuming for instructors to prepare.

Programming courses are increasingly attended around the world by students majoring in different fields, as learning a programming language is often a necessity for graduates of higher education. Social sciences students are among the groups of learners for whom introductory programming courses are offered. Whereas this group of learners might be highly motivated to learn how to write code for the first time, they are often pessimistic regarding their own abilities, and they start the course with a low level of self-confidence. This work in progress describes the author's experience with holding such a course geared towards humanities students. For the first few years, before the Covid-19 pandemic, the course was held in the traditional manner, i.e. in a classroom. In 2020, it had to suddenly be switched to an online format, until, finally, in 2023, it reverted to its face-to-face format. The paper describes the changes in class modality, the ways in which the teacher dealt with the sudden online format, as well as how the students perceived the level of difficulty and the level of enjoyment of taking part in the classes. Empirical observations, along with data gathered through questionnaires administered to students, highlight some of the challenges and the lessons learned during these switches in class modality.

Active learning is essential for the learning process, particularly when teaching an engineering discipline, where the practical aspects are crucial to the overall understanding of the concepts and their usefulness. This paper describes the implementation of active learning in an introductory software engineering course. It is based on the experience of teaching the course for 6 consecutive years, with the first four years in a face-to-face format, followed by two years in an online format.

The past decade has observed a continuously increasing internationalization of higher education institutions. Multicultural instruction is challenging for educators and students alike. Japanese universities follow the same trend, striving to become more and more internationalized, classes need to accommodate both local, Japanese students, and international, foreign students. Based on the author's experience of teaching in a Japanese university, this short paper will highlight some of the challenging aspects of teaching computer literacy in a multicultural environment and it will attempt to provide some guidelines for addressing these challenges.

Requirements specifications often make use of a number of scenarios that are interrelated and that depend on each other in many ways. However, they are often treated separately, one by one. We propose a new type of diagrams, named dependency diagrams, which are able to illustrate the various kinds of relationships existing between scenarios. We make use of a scenario matrix for each scenario and we describe the transformation process of scenarios into state machines, based on the information in the scenario matrices, and that in the dependency diagrams. The result is a number of state machines that can be used for detailed design models and code can further be generated from them. Using our approach, we can bridge the gap between analysis and design and we can bring the developer one step closer to the implementation.