Bringing Undergraduate Students Closer to a Real-World Information Retrieval Setting: Methodology and Resources

We describe a pilot experiment to update the program of an Information Retrieval course for Computer Science undergraduates. We have engaged the students in the development of a search engine from scratch, and they have been involved in the elaboration, also from scratch, of a complete test collection to evaluate their systems. With this methodology they get a whole vision of the Information Retrieval process as they would find it in a real-world setting, and their direct involvement in the evaluation makes them realize the importance of these laboratory experiments in Computer Science. We show that this methodology is indeed reliable and feasible, and so we plan on improving and keep using it in the next years, leading to a public repository of resources for Information Retrieval courses