(MU-CTL-01-12) Towards Model Driven Game Engineering in SimSYS: Requirements for the Agile Software Development Process Game

Software Engineering (SE) and Systems Engineering (Sys) are knowledge intensive, specialized, rapidly changing disciplines; their educational infrastructure faces significant challenges including the need to rapidly, widely, and cost effectively introduce new or revised course material; encourage the broad participation of students; address changing student motivations and attitudes; support undergraduate, graduate and lifelong learning; and incorporate the skills needed by industry. Games have a reputation for being fun and engaging; more importantly immersive, requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving. We believe educational games are essential in the next generation of e-learning tools. An extensible, freely available, engaging, problem-based game platform that provides students with an interactive simulated experience closely resembling the activities performed in a (real) industry development project would transform the SE/Sys education infrastructure. Our goal is to extend the state-of-the-art research in SE/Sys education by investigating a game development platform (GDP) from an interdisciplinary perspective (education, game research, and software/systems engineering). A meta-model has been proposed to provide a rigourous foundation that integrates the three disciplines. The GDP is intended to support the semi-automated development of collections of scripted games and their execution, where each game embodies a specific set of learning objectives. The games are scripted using a template based approach. The templates integrate three approaches: use cases; storyboards; and state machines (timed, concurrent, hierarchical state machines). The specification templates capture the structure of the game (Game, Acts, Scenes, Screens, Challenges), storyline, characters (player, non-player, external), graphics, music/sound effects, rules, and so on. The instantiated templates are (manually) transformed into XML game scripts that can be loaded into the SimSYS Game Play Engine. As a game is played, the game play events are logged; they are analyzed to automatically assess a player’s accomplishments and automatically adapt the game play script. Currently, we are manually defining a collection of games. The games are being used to ensure the GDP is flexible and reliable (i.e., the prototype can load and correctly run a variety of game scripts), the ontology is comprehensive, and the templates assist in defining well-organized, modular game scripts. In this report, we present the initial part of an Agile Software Development Process game (Act I, Scenes 1 and 2) that embodies learning objectives related to SE fundamentals (requirements, architecture, testing, process); planning with Gantt charts; working with budgets; and selecting a team for an agile development project. A student player is rewarded in the game by getting hired, scoring points, or getting promoted to lead a project. The game has a variety of settings including a classroom, job fair, and a work environment with meeting rooms, cubicles, and a water cooler station. The main non-player characters include a teacher, boss, and an evil peer. In the future, semi-automated support for creating new game scripts will be explored using a wizard interface. The templates will be formally defined, supporting automated transformation into XML game scripts that can be loaded into the SimSYS Game Engine. We also plan to explore transforming the requirements into a notation that can be imported into a commercial tool that supports Statechart simulation

Optical Filter Selector

One of the many challenges with launching projectiles into space is predicting how the environment in space will affect the trajectory. One way to do this is to look at optical emissions, also known as airglow, which can only be seen from earth with sensitive equipment. By taking measurements of the light from the airglow, properties about the upper atmosphere can be inferred. This is important because variability in the atmosphere can cause variability in space that can affect astronauts and satellites. In order to accomplish this task, optical filters must be used to observe different bands of wavelengths of light that target specific airglow emission features. The scope of this project is to design a product that autonomously switches through four filters of differing colors and wavelengths. This document will summarize the background research that has been performed to develop an understanding of the project and the objectives and requirements for the project. Additionally, this document will reiterate the problem, lay out the scope of the project and the engineering specifications, and provide a basic overview of testing the design against the specifications. This document will then describe the process for creating a solution to the problem. Then it will describe the final chosen design, the manufacturing plan, and the design verification plan. It will also summarize the manufacturing performed and the testing plans created. Finally, it will summarize what still needs to be completed and what team recommends moving forward

Incorporating Agile with MDA Case Study: Online Polling System

Nowadays agile software development is used in greater extend but for small organizations only, whereas MDA is suitable for large organizations but yet not standardized. In this paper the pros and cons of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Extreme programming have been discussed. As both of them have some limitations and cannot be used in both large scale and small scale organizations a new architecture has been proposed. In this model it is tried to opt the advantages and important values to overcome the limitations of both the software development procedures. In support to the proposed architecture the implementation of it on Online Polling System has been discussed and all the phases of software development have been explained.Comment: 14 pages,1 Figure,1 Tabl

The New Grid

The New Grid seeks to provide mobile users with an additional method for off-grid communication, or communication without connection to Internet infrastructure. The motivation for this project was to find another alternative to Internet-dependent communication. Current Internet infrastructure is antiquated; it is expensive to maintain and expand, it has numerous vulnerabilities and high-impact points of failure, and can be rendered unusable for lengthy periods of time by natural disasters or other catastrophes. This current grid will eventually need to be replaced by a more modern, scalable, and adaptive infrastructure. The results of the projects research showed that implementing a library to allow for the creation of mobile peer-to-peer mesh networks could serve as a starting point for a transition from current Internet infrastructure to a more scalable, adaptive, and reliable Internet- independent network grid. Development of The New Grid largely followed the Rational Unified Process, in which the development process is split into four phases: requirements gathering, system design, implementation, and testing. Most of fall quarter was spent outlining functional requirements for the system, designing possible methods of implementation, and researching similar solutions that seek to transition mass mobile communication to a newer, more modern network grid. The New Grid differs from similar solutions because it has been implemented as a modular library. Current systems that allow for off-grid mobile connection exist as independent applications with a defined context and predetermined usability scope. We, the design team, found that implementing the system in the form of a modular library has multiple benefits. Primarily, this implementation would allow The New Grid to be deployed as widely as possible. Developers can both write applications around our library as well as include specific modules into existing applications without impacting other modules or introducing additional overhead into a system. Another benefit of deploying the system as a modular library is adaptability. The current, initial stable build of The New Grid uses Bluetooth Low Energy as its backbone for facilitating communication within large networks of mobile devices; however, this library could use any existing or future communication protocol to facilitate connection as long as a hook is written to allow The New Grid to interface with that protocol. Thus, The New Grid is not limited by which connection protocols currently exist, a property that other similar systems do not possess. The New Grid can be used in any application that requires connection between users. The most common applications would likely be messaging, file sharing, or social networking. While developers may find a variety of uses for The New Grid, its primary purpose is to facilitate reliable connection and secure data transfer in an environment with a large user base. Achieving this goal was proven feasible through research and testing the library with a small cluster of Android devices communicating solely with Bluetooth Low Energy. Expanding this group of a few phones to a larger mesh network of hundreds of devices was shown to be feasible through testing the librarys algorithms and protocols on a large network of virtual devices. As long as developers seek to create applications that allow users to communicate independent of Internet infrastructure, The New Grid will allow smartphone users to communicate off-grid and hopefully spur a switch from infrastructure-dependent mobile communication to user-centric, adaptive, and flexible connection