Some Experiences from Organizing a Student Conference

Abstract

This paper describes some pedagogical experiences from a course for 1st year students following the Master  program in Information Technology and Communications at Lund Institute of Technology. The main objective of the coruse "Communication Systems" is to give an overview of the telecommunication area, in particular Internet. In order to inspire the students, the course contains a project that finishes with a student conference. In this paper we describe how the project is conducted. One pedagogical benefit of including this type of project in a course is, for example, that the project encourages the students to learn the basic theory. Also, the students become highly motivated since they believe that the department takes good care of them. However, one problem for the teachers is that not all students are mature enough to have the responsibility of performing a project without continuous control from teachers.