Teaching Cyber-Physical Systems in Student Project Groups: How do Alumni assess the Experience in Retrospective?

Abstract

The development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) requires software engineering competences in an interdisciplinary context including physics, mechatronics, and electrical engineering. In addition, social skills and teamwork competences are necessary since the current complexity of CPS exceeds the capacity of a single human. The Computer Science faculty at the University of Oldenburg offers project groups (PGs) in the Masters curriculum to particularly strengthen these competences. To this end, small teams of students work jointly during two semesters on large software or systems engineering problems, which are often inspired by research projects with industrial partners. In this paper we report on a survey that we conducted among alumni of a set of nine PGs that worked on different challenging CPS problems. The main questions were how alumni who already started their professional career assess the learning experience and different aspects of the design of the CPS PGs in hindsight. The responses indicate a good learning success on the main learning objectives of the considered CPS PGs, and a large majority of respondents considers the course to be comparably relevant or very relevant in the overall Masters curriculum.