Informatics in Education

The development of communication and other soft skills among computer science students is not usually an easy task. Often, curricula focus on technical skills, with team projects being used for the improvement of communication skills. However, these teams usually comprise solely of computer science students. In this paper, we present a didactical methodology, called MIMI, which can be used in a short, intensive, programme for undergraduate students. This methodology has been implemented in real projects that have run annually since 2014. We advocate the use of team-based projects, with an important requirement that each team is both multidisciplinary and multinational. Additionally, the period of teamwork is short and intensive. A significant role in the project is given to team mentors. A mentor is a person, usually a university lecturer, who helps the team organize their work and tracks if the team’s planned didactical results are being achieved. The program has proved to stimulate an increase of soft skills among the students who participated and, in particular, among the computer science students. The detailed description of our process will allow others to implement and build similar events in their university or company environments, the focus of which is a Multinational, Intercultural, Multidisciplinary & Intensive (MIMI) methodology approach.

For the previous six years, under the auspices of the ``Stability Pact of South-Eastern Europe'' and DAAD, a joint project for developing a course in ``Software Engineering'' has been conducted. The intention of the project was to enable usage of shared materials for software engineering courses at a wide range of universities in participating countries. During school-year 2004/05, for the first time the same course, with the same case study, and the same assignments has been conducted at the Humboldt University Berlin, and the University of Novi Sad. In this paper, we share some of the experiences obtained through conducting the same course in the two school-years: 2004/05 and 2005/06.