Empowered Guinea Pigs: Stories of Cross-Disciplinary Projects in an Experimental Educational Software Design Course

This chapter tells the story of an educational software design course through reflections written by the instructor and student coauthors throughout the semester. The course design was inspired by the instructor’s experiences in a software design and development team. Driven by struggles in educational software’s rapid growth, the course focused on the design (i.e., learner analysis, prototyping, and testing) using a project-based pedagogy. With students from a wide variety of backgrounds, learning is focused on the educational software creation process in parallel with analyzing needs and designing software for real clients in multidisciplinary teams. To understand the experience of the course, the authors wrote and analyzed reflections about their experience in the course.