SOFTWARE ENGINEERING at Canterbury Christ Church University

Our Software Engineering BEng will enable you to produce secure, high quality, usable and adaptable software systems. This is a dynamic course that will develop your skills in analysis, design, programming, testing and evaluation.

Why Study Software Engineering

Producing secure, high quality, usable and adaptable software systems is a challenging task in today’s interconnected world. Software Engineers who can collaborate with others in effective teams are to produce reliable, robust and effective software on time and on budget are in very high demand. Understanding users and creating software that will support them in their tasks means that a broad skill base is helpful to a modern software engineer. This programme of study will develop your skills in analysis, design, programming, testing and evaluation to produce software solutions, as well as helping you to understand team dynamics and working together towards common goals.

This innovative course has been designed in collaboration with industry and you’ll have the excellent opportunity to work with a range of employers. We offer a truly immersive learning opportunity where the applied side of the course provides the opportunity to solve problems provided by local industry. Working with your peers and other fields of engineering you will typically have the opportunity to apply theory to solving industry supplied work related/work based problems.

We are one of only a handful of universities in the UK to offer the CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate) international engineering education model developed by MIT 

Who is this course for?

This course is for you if you enjoy computing, (particularly the application of programming) and wish to learn how to progress from amateur programmer to professional software engineering practitioner. You will develop technical and employability skills to take the software engineering theory into real commercial practice to solve society’s problems.

Software Engineering provides a real opportunity to take an idea through design, build, test and production stages so that ideas become a real benefit to human kind and many industries. For example, monitoring of lone living diabetic patients so that blood sugar levels alert medical professionals to any dangerous blood sugar levels and location of the patients to enable emergency medical intervention.  

This course is particularly for you if you would like to contribute to research and developing software solutions to support society, from improving data communication to enabling smoother operations. E.g. paramedics being able to access patients records when out on an emergency shout so they can be more effective in providing patient care, attention and treatment, saving time and lives.

What will i study?

You’ll use the pioneering CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate) approach to problem solve software challenges. We are one of only a handful of universities in the UK to offer the CDIO international engineering education model developed by MIT that allows you to learn in a practical, hands-on way to tackle real industrial problems.

The BEng Software Engineering course will develop your learning in analysing, the application of your knowledge and understanding of researching, designing, developing, testing, and maintaining professional software. Software engineering is aimed to support professional software development of products for specific business purpose for example banking mobile app, student record information system, automation manufacturing monitoring and control systems. Software engineers design, build and test computer programmes that interface with hardware or software. This course will make use of computer laboratories, practicals and workshops to develop your technical subject and employability skills. You will have the opportunity to work in mixed engineering teams to research and solve industry work-related/based sourced problems. The CDIO approach will typically enable you to make contributions to industry - your software engineered prototype solution maybe the building block to a final solution used by industry. 

During the BEng Software Engineering, you will be supported to develop your employability skills and job application skills to apply for year-long placement opportunities. Year-long placement opportunities in engineering often lead to opening doors to great potential engineering graduate employment opportunities with companies such as IBM, BULL, P&O, UEL and South Eastern Railway.