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The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) has offered an introductory course in Software Engineering since 1986. It is primarily targeted at undergraduate students in their ninth semester. The structure of the course is based on a two-hour lecture session, a one-hour discussion session and a two-hour practice session taking place in the laboratory every week. Students gain practical experience by working collaboratively in small groups on reasonably large projects. The study material consists of a textbook entitled An Introduction to Software Engineering1, written in Greek, along with some review papers from the recent literature. The conventional mode of teaching, however, faces major problems2:

• Lecture attendance decreases. More specifically, the percentage of students actually attending the classroom sessions is less than 50%. The main reason is that some of the students have already job obligations.• It is difficult for students to ask questions and receive help with problems outside of the instructor’s appointed office hours.• There is little interaction in the classroom. Students are often overly shy and prefer not to ask questions.