For Software Engineering Instructors

We encourage software engineering instructors to consider advertising SCORE to their students, and to use SCORE projects for their own software engineering (SE) teaching assignements. This can be of great benefit for both students and instructors. Here are a few hints to exploit at best the opportunities offered by SCORE.

SCORE projects are challenging and taken from real-life systems and problems, so your students can have a unique learning experience. Typically, SCORE projects can be, but do not have to be, developed during a university software engineering course. In some cases it may happen that only certain parts of a SCORE project can fit with the specific focus of your course; in such cases we suggest that you invite the best students to form teams and enter officially the SCORE contest as a follow up of their work accomplished during the course.

Administering SCORE projects and supervising SCORE teams is an excellent way to motivate and nurture your best students, as well as to make your own school and courses internationally visible by the quality of their achievements. Similarly, one of SCORE's main goals is to reach a large base of potential (and talented!) participants.

If you are interested in specific topics concerning SE, check out SCORE's special recognitions (for SCORE11, they are currently formal methods and distributed development). If one of them matches one of your topics of interest, you might suggest to the team(s) you mentor to compete for them.

If you look at SCORE's timeline, you'll see that a little less than a full year (from February 2010 to January 2011) elapses between the project themes presentation and the closing of the submission of the summary reports (the first deliverable). This should encompass two full terms in most academic calendars. However, the target project "size" is approximately as a "standard" term project. Hence, you can pick SCORE's project themes and use them regardless of which semester your software engineering course is in.

Notice that the submission procedure opens at the beginning of the year 2010, and will remain open until mid-January 2011 (but registration closes in November 2010). Teams can submit their project (i.e. the summary report) at any time in that window, e.g., even during the spring/summer of 2010. In the case of special needs (e.g. if the deadline for the submission occurs during vacation time) teams can not only deliver the first report whenever it is ready, but can also ask to be notified on their possible selection, to submit the full deliverable of project documentation, within one month after delivering the first report.

Finally, it is important to understand that if you want to compete in SCORE you must pick one of the project themes proposed by the program committee: No "self-proposed" projects can be accepted. Completeness and flexibility of requirements may vary from theme to theme; any modifications in the requirements of the application to be developed must be negotiated by SCORE participants (and their SE instructors) with project proponents, much as changes in the original requirements are sometimes agreed upon between application developers and customers.