Abstract
Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development,operation and maintenance of software. Thus software engineering education refers to teach computer science or information technology students with software engineering principles, knowledge, and skills. Many Taiwan's higher education institutions offer software engineering programmes, but the purpose and relevance of these programmes within CS or CSIE departments may not always be obvious. The reality is that while industries require many skillful software engineers, universities are not delivering them soon. In fact, the entire and very complex software system can lead to many problems and best practices in software engineering, and these problems and practices are often the best way to learn software engineering for students. This also poses a special challenge to software engineering teaching, because it is usually difficult to expose students to a real software system development process during school classes. In addition, software development is a group activity. All team members need to cooperate with each other, and constantly adjust and modify the project if needed. In Taiwan, very few courses applyied competitive learning strategies to facilitate software engineering education and training. This project sought to investigate the effect of competitive learning strategies on university students learning outcomes in software engineering. During this project, students would be able to learn how to design and implement software systems that address real problems and satisfy real stakeholders’ needs. We also plan to contribute guidances and suggestions for other teachers based on our own experiences and eresearch findings through this project. Our purpose is to educate and train students to develop and test software following various international standards, and meet the quality requirements and standards. Students could be motivated to learn through software competitions to enhance their learning outcomes in software engineering. We also hope that this project’s research finding will convince and inspire more people to teach software engineering-related courses in Taiwan.