Infusing Critical Thinking Skill Classification into a Software Engineering Course

Life long learning is important to keep oneself up-to-date in ones profession. Due to the rapid evolutionary nature of computer science, life long learning becomes even more important. Equipping the students with critical and creative thinking skills can make learning more effective. Critical and creative thinking skills can be taught either by offering explicit courses on such topics or the important skills can be infused into the contents of various courses in the computer science or computer engineering programs. Teaching critical skills along with the course contents can prove itself more appropriate than only transferring the subject knowledge (course content). Some topics may provide a very natural way to teach a critical thinking skill. This paper describes some of our efforts in infusing the critical thinking skill of classification into a course on Principles of Software Engineering in our undergraduate computer science curriculum