A Germany-Brazil Experience Report on Teaching Software Engineering for Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Students

This article describes a successful education technology transfer between Germany and Brazil applied to the teaching of software engineering for undergraduate students of the electrical engineering course at the Federal University of Amazonas - UFAM. The result of this experience was a significant increase on the interest of the students, i.e. the amount of enrolled students increased reaching numbers never met before and the drop out rate was smaller than the average of the other lectures. The main reason for the observed changes was the introduction of a laboratory platform in the lecture. This guided the students during the development of a software system used in a robot race at the end of the term. The robot race itself may also be another reason for the great motivation observed, when the students compete to show which team produced the best software. This experience is one of the results of the Unibral project, a scientific and academic cooperation between UFAM and the Institute of Industrial Automation and Software Engineering of the University of Stuttgart.