Task-centric holistic agile approach on teaching cyber physical systems engineering

Context: Cyber physical systems are getting pervasive in our every-day life. For their development the industry needs highly-qualified and skilled employees. The employees need to have a wide breadth of knowledge in many engineering disciplines and possess excellent soft skills. Ideally, the needed skills are taught in practical settings. Problem: The versatility of the problems in development of cyber physical systems poses a challenge for the teaching. A common approach to teaching software engineering concepts is to have students form teams to create a software product; this allows them to experience the problems first hand. However, this approach, compared with "traditional" software engineering and software development, is much more difficult for cyber-physical systems, due to the need to have a wide understanding in multiple engineering fields. At the same time, the education of engineering concepts lack on teaching of soft skills that are often key success factors for engineering projects. Approach: We developed a novel task-centric holistic agile approach on teaching cyber physical systems. The concept is task-centric concluding five teaching approaches that may be used when needed. The concept focuses the teaching of technical skills and soft skills. Result: The proposed concept allows students to have an insight into the difficulties involved in development of cyberphysical systems from multiple points of view in a realistic way. Conclusion: The holistic agile approach on teaching cyber physical systems has the potential to reinforce conceptual instruction with hands-on learning at a fraction of the time and cost that would be required to run a true cyber-physical systems development project.