Allen School Colloquium: Aligning Computing Education with Modern Software Development

Title: Bridging the Gap: Aligning Computing Education with Modern Software Development Speaker: Anshul Shah (UC San Diego) Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2026 Abstract: The academia-industry gap in software engineering describes the misalignment between the skills students learn in universities and the expectations placed upon early-career software developers. This gap is already present: while software developers work on large, existing code bases, university coursework typically requires students to create projects from scratch. Unfortunately, this gap is growing: as developers increasingly rely on GenAI tools, CS programs must consider how to prepare students to use these tools while still promoting student learning. Computing education research tends to study the final code artifacts that students produce (i.e., assignment submissions). In contrast, my work aims to understand the *processes* that students use to create those final code artifacts. In this talk, I’ll share my work to understand and improve three programming processes: 1) incremental development, 2) program comprehension in large code bases, and 3) student-AI collaboration for programming. I’ll highlight the novel teaching techniques, curricula, and instructional materials that my research has contributed to across the undergraduate curriculum, from introductory programming to advanced software engineering courses. Finally, I’ll discuss key challenges facing computing education in the age of GenAI and how my work to emphasize “process over product” will help computing educators adapt to meet the moment. Bio: Anshul Shah is a PhD candidate at UC San Diego advised by Gerald Soosairaj, Leo Porter, and Bill Griswold. His research aims to improve undergraduate computer science curricula to prepare students for modern software development. His work has been published in top computing education venues, such as ICER and TOCE, and has been featured on the GenAI in CS Education Consortium website. He has been selected for two international working groups that have focused on developing instructional materials related to code quality and AI literacy. He's been recognized for both his teaching and research, earning the Doctoral Award for Teaching Excellence from UCSD CSE in 2025 and the Best Paper Award at ICER 2025--a premier computing education venue. This video is in closed captioned.