Teach students to distinguish durable principles from contingent capabilities to keep their model of the field current¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The closing module's strategy for future-proofing the discipline is an explicit inventory of which taught principles are likely durable and which are tied to current capabilities. The durable list includes "co-evolution, intent discipline, verification before trust, human accountability, the audit trail and framing as the first design decision," while the contingent list includes specific ADE features, current cost structures, today's failure-mode taxonomy, current context window sizes and current orchestration patterns. Students learn to read the boundary between the two lists and to update their model of the field as model releases, ADE evolution and regulatory developments arrive; the closing assessment artefact carries this meta-skill into grading.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• The course must teach students to read the boundary between durable principles and contingent capabilities, and the closing artefact asks them to state what they expect to revise in the curriculum within eighteen months and how they will know to revise it

Constraints¶

• The article presents the durable-versus-contingent distinction as a design judgment supported by historical example (Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming outlasting its tools), not as an empirically tested result

Target Learners¶

• undergraduate software engineering students approaching graduation

Target Learning Goals¶

• maintaining an up-to-date mental model of the discipline as technology shifts
• distinguishing durable principles from contingent capabilities

Related Strategies¶

• Adapt the guided inquiry policy co-design activity across disciplines, framing AI as a sociotechnical system

Examples¶

• ASE-26 — the curriculum whose closing module carries this inventory

Key Sources¶

• Mikael Gorsky (Holon Institute of Technology). (2026). ASE-26: a curriculum for agentic software engineering as a discipline. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01152