Abstract:

Many companies have been using agile methods because it gives them more flexibility in their development process. Comparing agile with traditional management approaches, agile offers many benefits such as increasing team productivity, lean development and employee satisfaction. Design thinking belongs to the family of modern agile approaches to project management and development of new products. It is based on intensive collaboration of individually working agile team members. As such it needs to be taught accordingly.

At MIAS, CTU in Prague, we offer a course called Agile BootCamp. As the CTU in Prague is newly participating in the EuroTeQ Teaching Fund, the Agile BootCamp was selected as one of the courses that will be offered and taught to other universities participating in the EuroTeQ Engineering University. It is not a coincidence that authors of this article are also teachers of the Agile BootCamp course. Our decision was to use innovative approaches to both the way of teaching and study materials and the way of collaboration between students and universities during the course.

This paper introduces the methods and innovative approaches the authors used as preparation for teaching the course. Our approach is based on three pillars including:
(i) educational videos, textbook and working sheets mutually interconnected and used for self-education of the students,
(ii) an intensive 5 day course where students work on real problems and real life assignments while guided and mentored by the teachers, and
(iii) international collaboration as students of the course come from several European universities participating in the EuroTeQ Engineering University.

The paper closely describes the individual pillars while presenting the innovative approaches to teaching and learning Agile.

Keywords:

Innovation, teaching, agile, project management, design thinking.