Mentors can enrich and extend your teaching by supporting students learning during their study. Here’s a paper I presented yesterday describing some teaching we’ve done over the last decade (2015-2025) mentoring software engineers on a second year undergraduate course in Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK. Our mentors have come from around forty different organisations from startups to BigTech and everything in between, using a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) called stendhalgame.org for the project. Here’s the abstract of the paper below [1] published open access in the full conference proceedings from Computing Education Practice (CEP) at Durham University via the ACM Digital Library [2]:
Employers often remark that Computer Science graduates do not have the right skills to work on modern software engineering projects where agile practices, continuous integration, test-driven development, git workflows and regular code reviews are commonplace. To address this issue, we designed a course to introduce students to some of the realities of software engineering outside of academia. We describe the journey of building and running an industrial mentoring scheme for this course where students are assigned an experienced engineering mentor from industry who each guide a small team of six through an open source project.
This sets the course apart from the more traditional engineering projects, where students build small and simple system from scratch. Instead we ask students to fix bugs and add features in a large and unfamiliar open source codebase, a game called stendhalgame.org. The mentoring scheme is a key part of enabling that, both in terms of motivating the students but also in providing guidance and advice on how to tackle these kinds of software engineering task. We reflect on the program, which has been taken by more than 2000 second year students over a nine year period. The main contribution is the combination of human mentoring with software that facilitates more meaningful discussions between mentors and mentees that would otherwise have not taken place. As far as we can tell, this is novel in the UK in terms of scale and approach.
Thanks to the students, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), mentors and my co-authors (especially Suzanne Embury but also Ben Possible, Christopher Page and Tom Carroll) who made this work possible by designing, developing, delivering, improving and (in the case of students) actually doing the course. Thanks to Karl Southern and Steven Bradley for organising CEP, which celebrated its tenth birthday 🎂 this year. We wrote a paper about that too, but that’s another story for another post. [3]
If you teach Computing, it’s always worth attending CEP, even if you don’t want to publish anything but are interested to learn what others are doing – this focus on Practice, rather than Research. [3] CEP is full of lots of good ideas, papers, workshops and interesting people teaching Computing at a wide range of institutions from primary school through secondary school, from FE Colleges, Apprenticeships and a range of different Universities. I’ll post the slides and recorded presentation talk here shortly. The full course material is at software-eng.netlify.app
References
- Duncan Hull, Suzanne Embury, Ben Possible, Christopher Page and Tom Carroll (2026) Improving practical software engineering teaching with industrial mentoring of open source team projects. CEP ’26: Proceedings of the 10th Computing Education Practice Pages 29–32, DOI:10.1145/3772338.3772350
- CEP ’26: Proceedings of the 10th Computing Education Practice, Durham University DOI:10.1145/3772338
- Steven Bradley, Rosanne English, Sally Fincher, Duncan Hull and Mark Zarb (2025) From Marco to Maria: Ten Years of the Computing Education Practice Conference, Koli Calling ’25: Proceedings of the 25th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research Article No.: 15, Pages 1 – 11 Article No.: 15, Pages 1–11 DOI:10.1145/3769994.3770003
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