(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

Mapping the technology landscape : linking pedagogy to the affordances of different technologies

This work evaluates the application of different learning technologies and their suitability to support blended learning approaches in Higher Education. Chickering and Gamsons's Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) were used as an underlying pedagogical framework to evaluate the "perceived affordances‟ (Norman, 1999) of learning technologies.Chickering and Gamson‟s principles were selected as a framework due to their "face-validity‟, the accessibility of their language and since they have been derived from numerous years of reflective and effective teaching.Along with the principles we describe and recommend an innovative methodology for evaluation. This methodology can be used in a context of similar evaluation exercises.Final Accepted Versio

A Thick Industrial Design Studio Curriculum

This presentation was part of the session : Pedagogy: Procedures, Scaffolds, Strategies, Tactics24th National Conference on the Beginning Design StudentThis paper describes an industrial design studio course based in a private university in Izmir, Turkey where second year industrial design students, for the first time, engage in a studio project. The design studio course emphasises three distinct areas of competence in designing that are the focus of the curriculum. They are; design process: the intellectual act of solving a design problem; design concept: the imagination and sensibility to conceive of appropriate design ideas; and presentation: the ability to clearly and evocatively communicate design concepts. The studio is 'thick' with materials, tasks and activities that are intentionally sequenced to optimise learning in a process that is known as educational 'scaffolding.' The idea of a process--a patient journey toward it's destination, is implicit in the studio that is full of opportunities for reflection-in-action. A significant feature is the importance placed on drawing and model making. An exemplary design process should show evidence of 'breadth'--meaning a wide search for solutions where a range of alternatives explored throughout; followed by an incremental refinement of the chosen solution where elements of the final design concept are developed thoroughly and in detail--called 'depth.' Learning to design is predicated on an engagement in and manipulation of the elements of the design problem. Evidence of that learning will be found by examining the physical materials and results of the design process. The assessment criteria are published with the brief at the outset of design project and outcomes are spelt out at the end. Students are remind throughout project of the criteria, which is to say they are reminded of pedagogical aims of the studio. Assessment criteria are detailed and the advantages of summative assessment are described

Links between the personalities, styles and performance in computer programming

There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is a breadth-first style. To the extent we know there is no study on the influence of personality on them. The objective of this study is to understand the influence of personality on programming styles. We did a correlational study with 65 programmers at the University of Stuttgart. Academic achievement, programming experience, attitude towards programming and five personality factors were measured via self-assessed survey. The programming styles were asked in the survey or mined from the software repositories. Performance in programming was composed of bug-proneness of programmers which was mined from software repositories, the grades they got in a software project course and their estimate of their own programming ability. We did statistical analysis and found that Openness to Experience has a positive association with breadth-first style and Conscientiousness has a positive association with depth-first style. We also found that in addition to having more programming experience and better academic achievement, the styles of working depth-first and saving coarse-grained revisions improve performance in programming.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figure

What is the impact of blogging used with self-monitoring strategies for adolescents who struggle with writing?

Plan B Paper. 2012. Master of Science in Education- Reading--University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Teacher Education Department. 28 leaves. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 25-26).Writing is an onerous task for those who struggle with the skill. The basic prerequisites of organizing thoughts, transcribing thoughts into words, and writing down those words is fundamental to the more advanced skills of developing a sense of audience, writing with voice and applying conventions. Without proficient skills, students who cannot write, do not write. Positive attitude toward the process of writing suffers. Time spent on actual writing is limited. As a consequence, writing skill does not develop. Students who struggle with writing can be supported in their skill development through self-monitoring strategies. Self-monitoring strategies for writing give students a systematic process to know how to approach a writing task. The clear step-by-step process breaks down difficult skills and allows students to build proficiency through guided practice and eventually, independence. This action research project explored the impact of using self-monitoring strategies with the 21st century skill of blogging within a Writer's Workshop instructional model. Sixteen students (eleven males, five females) in grades 6-8th participated in a twelve week study. Target writing skills of fluency, stamina, motivation, awareness of audience and participation in peer review were measured for changes over the course of the study. Students were instructed in the use of self-monitoring strategies focusing on increasing word counts in correct word sequence timings, on-command prompt passages, and formal writing process pieces. Blogging was introduced and used to apply target skills to a digital writing setting. Each student learned self monitoring strategies to compose posts in personal blogs and to read and comment on other students' blogs. Pre-and post-writing attitude survey, correct word sequence timings and writing samples were taken throughout the study to assess each students' skill level and attitude toward writing. The group showed average gains of 34% in correct word sequence and 66% in word counts of process writing pieces. Qualitative data and quantitative data demonstrate that writing skills and attitudes toward writing also showed positive development when self-monitoring strategies were used to support the writing tasks of blogging in a Writer's Workshop model

Speed-accuracy strategy regulations in prefrontal tumor patients

The ability to flexibly switch between fast and accurate decisions is crucial in everyday life. Recent neuroimaging evidence suggested that left lateral prefrontal cortex plays a role in switching from a quick response strategy to an accurate one. However, the causal role of the left prefrontal cortex in this particular, non-verbal, strategy switch has never been demonstrated. To fill this gap, we administered a perceptual decision-making task to neuro-oncological prefrontal patients, in which the requirement to be quick or accurate changed randomly on a trial-by-trial basis. To directly assess hemispheric asymmetries in speed-accuracy regulation, patients were tested a few days before and a few days after surgical excision of a brain tumor involving either the left (N=13) or the right (N=12) lateral frontal brain region. A group of age- and education-matched healthy controls was also recruited. To gain more insight on the component processes implied in the task, performance data (accuracy and speed) were not only analyzed separately but also submitted to a diffusion model analysis. The main findings indicated that the left prefrontal patients were impaired in appropriately adopting stricter response criteria in speed-to-accuracy switching trials with respect to healthy controls and right prefrontal patients, who were not impaired in this condition. This study demonstrates that the prefrontal cortex in the left hemisphere is necessary for flexible behavioral regulations, in particular when setting stricter response criteria is required in order to successfully switch from a speedy strategy to an accurate one

An evaluation framework to drive future evolution of a research prototype

The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) requires evaluation to confirm its suitability as a development environment for distributed software engineers. The evaluation will take note of several factors including usability of OSCAR as a stand-alone system, scalability and maintainability of the system and novel features not provided by existing artefact management systems. Additionally, the evaluation design attempts to address some of the omissions (due to time constraints) from the industrial partner evaluations. This evaluation is intended to be a prelude to the evaluation of the awareness support being added to OSCAR; thus establishing a baseline to which the effects of awareness support may be compared

Software Engineers' Information Seeking Behavior in Change Impact Analysis - An Interview Study

Software engineers working in large projects must navigate complex information landscapes. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is a task that relies on engineers' successful information seeking in databases storing, e.g., source code, requirements, design descriptions, and test case specifications. Several previous approaches to support information seeking are task-specific, thus understanding engineers' seeking behavior in specific tasks is fundamental. We present an industrial case study on how engineers seek information in CIA, with a particular focus on traceability and development artifacts that are not source code. We show that engineers have different information seeking behavior, and that some do not consider traceability particularly useful when conducting CIA. Furthermore, we observe a tendency for engineers to prefer less rigid types of support rather than formal approaches, i.e., engineers value support that allows flexibility in how to practically conduct CIA. Finally, due to diverse information seeking behavior, we argue that future CIA support should embrace individual preferences to identify change impact by empowering several seeking alternatives, including searching, browsing, and tracing.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehensio