Ciência sem Fronteiras through an engineering lens: what students brought back besides English
Leandro Veloso Rodrigues defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis investigating the impact of Brazil’s Ciência sem Fronteiras program on the soft skills of future software engineers.
Brasília, July 7, 2016
The Ciência sem Fronteiras program was, in the early 2010s, one of Brazil’s largest bets on academic internationalization. Five years after the program’s peak, Leandro Veloso Rodrigues defended an undergraduate thesis that asked what actually remained — not in terms of transcripts, but in terms of behavioral competencies developed by returning scholarship holders in FCTE/UnB’s Software Engineering program. The research was advised by Prof. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas and co-advised by Prof. Fabiana Freitas Mendes .
The starting point is a claim the field has been repeating tirelessly: in software projects, soft skills — social, personal, and cognitive — carry as much weight as technical competencies. They are cultivated through exposure to new contexts, different colleagues, and challenges that force readaptation. A stint abroad seems, at first glance, the perfect recipe.
The thesis investigates whether that promise holds. Rather than treating the program as an untouchable monument, the work takes the empirical question seriously: which behavioral skills were actually developed, and how does that development show up in the day-to-day of returning students. It is an exercise in soft skills rare in Brazilian literature, and one that gains documentary value as Ciência sem Fronteiras is reshaped for new formats.
The work also led to the paper Um estudo sobre o perfil das equipes de desenvolvimento de softwares educacionais, published at the XXVII Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education, in Uberlândia, in 2016, on pages 159-168. The paper lists Leandro among the authors and extends the discussion on team profiles in educational software.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.