A framework for class activities to cultivate responsible leadership in software engineering

What is it about?

There is a greater need to develop better soft skills in Computer Science and Software Engineering students such as written and verbal communication, collaboration across disciplines, ability to give and take constructive feedback, and empathy to help manage conflict. It is also imperative to teach professional and ethical skills like trust, transparency, and building software systems that are appropriate, safe, reliable and improve the lives of all people. In this work, our goal is to propose and describe class activities dedicated to teaching and helping CS/SE students to learn concepts of professional and ethical values and computational sustainability with a side benefit of developing soft skills. The approach is modelled after Toastmasters, a very successful association present in over 140 countries with almost 350,000 members across more than 16,000 clubs. We put forward our goal and give a general description of a Toastmasters club and how it is conducted. Further, we detailed some activities and projects having Computer Science and Software Engineering context that can be done by students as part of a relevant class. Finally, we briefly describe the approach that we are undertaking in our first pilot activities and their integration with additional synergetic strategies.

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Photo by Mapbox on Unsplash

Photo by Mapbox on Unsplash