TITLE: The Need for Apprenticeship in Software Engineering Education
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 28, 2017 2:02 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
In
his conversation with Tyler Cowen,
Ben Sasse talks a bit about how students learn in our schools of
public policy, business, and law:
We haven't figured out in most professional schools how to
create apprenticeship models where you cycle through different
aspects of what doing this kind of work will actually look
like. There are ways that there are tighter feedback loops at
a med school than there are going to be at a policy school.
There are things that I don't think we've thought nearly
enough about ways that professional school models should
diverge from traditional, theoretical, academic disciplines or
humanities, for example.
We see a similar continuum in what works best, and what is needed,
for learning computer science and learning software engineering.
Computer science education can benefit from the tighter feedback
loops and such that apprenticeship provides, but it also has a
substantial theoretical component that is suitable for classroom
instruction. Learning to be a software engineer requires a shift
to the other end of the continuum: we can learn important things,
in the classroom, but much of the important the learning happens
in the trenches, making things and getting feedback.
A few universities have made big moves in how they structure
software engineering instruction, but most have taken only halting
steps. They are often held back by a institutional loyalty to the
traditional academic model, or out of sheer curricular habit.
The one place you see apprenticeship models in CS is, of course,
graduate school. Students who enter research work in the lab
under the mentorship of faculty advisors and more senior grad
students. It took me a year or so in graduate school to figure
out that I needed to begin to place more focus on my research
ideas than on my classes. (I hadn't committed to a lab or an
advisor yet.)
In lieu of a changed academic model, internships of the sort I
mentioned recently
can be really helpful for undergrad CS students looking to go
into software development. Internships create a weird tension
for faculty... Most students come back from the workplace with
a new appreciation for the academic knowledge they learn in the
classroom, which is good, but they also back to wonder why more
of their schoolwork can't have the character of learning in the
trenches. They know to want more!
Project-based courses
are a way for us to bring the value of apprenticeship to the
undergraduate classroom. I am looking forward to building
compilers with ten hardy students this fall.
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