Four years of experience teaching Simulation Software Engineering

In 2021, we established a new master’s lecture at the University of Stuttgart called Simulation Software Engineering (SSE) – RSE with a focus on simulation science. We target a diverse audience from various Computer Science and Computational Engineering programs, but with a certain background in simulation. The course then teaches everything else that is needed to develop simulation software beyond programming: version control, virtualization and containerization, building and packaging, documentation, and testing and continuous integration. The ultimate learning goal is to contribute to existing free, community-driven simulation software. Combining lectures with individual project challenges, students have successfully contributed to diverse projects such as Makie, DuMuX, and FEniCSx. All material of the course is openly available (https://simulation-software-engineering.github.io). In this talk, we present the course format, the motivation behind the course, and an outline of the educational material. Moreover, we discuss our experiences after now four years and show statistics on the contributions.