Teaching and learning computer science soft skills using soft skills: The students' perspective

This paper continues a previous paper [1] in which we described students' gradual understanding of computer science (CS) and software engineering (SE) soft skills. Our study focused on a course we taught on soft skills in CS and SE, offered by the Department of Computer Science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. The course was developed in response to a call by the Israeli hi-tech industry to equip Technion CS graduates with such skills. In [1] we presented the nature of CS soft skills, described the course schedule, including the teaching principles applied in the course, and showed how, in the course of the course, students gradually constructed a mental perception of CS soft skills in a 4-stage process. In this paper, we refine the comprehension process into a 6-rung ladder, based on further data analysis and additional experience gained when teaching the course for a second time. We elaborate on the additional rungs and further illuminate the results of two evaluation surveys on the course that were distributed to the students (in addition to the formal course evaluation administrated by the Technion's Center for the Promotion of Teaching). One of our main conclusions is that the course provides students with the opportunity to express their desire to be more involved in the teaching process of the course and to discuss and analyze their own soft skills. In other words, students realize the importance and significance of learning soft skills by actually implementing these skills in the learning process. In the Summary part of the paper, we present several pedagogical conclusions that are based on this observation and that we intend to implement in the future when teaching this course.