(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

Experience Report: A Sustainable Serious Educational Game Capstone Project

Capstone courses play a key role in many Computer Science/Software Engineering curricula. They offer a summative opportunity for SE students to apply their skills and knowledge in a single experience and prepare them for work in industry. Capstones have many attributes that make them a valuable high-impact practice, yet there are several challenges that can be associated with them. These challenges include the general nature of a capstone that prevents deeper applications of skills, not to mention the difficulty of creating an interesting and engaging design project upon which students can make meaningful contributions and engage in extensive team dynamics. This experience report outlines an innovative approach to a senior design capstone course that addresses common limitations of capstone courses. The SimSYS capstone course is unique in that it involved a mixed team organization involving a more senior design team who led a development team over the course of the semester, thereby leveraging the diverse experience of capstone students completing their CS/SE degree. The results point to solutions for continuing a capstone project successfully in subsequent semesters that could be of interest to other SE curriculum designers looking to develop effective capstone courses

Using Games in Software Engineering Education to Increase Student Success and Retention

Summary form only given. Spoken language technologies have reached enough maturity to be integrated in many applications in eHealth and eLearning. The challenges and the potential are enormous. There are many other areas in which this claim could be equally made, but these two areas share many technical issues and, of course, they also share a huge significance from a social point of view. This was the driving force for our recent efforts at the Spoken Language Systems Lab of INESC-ID in terms of eHealth and eLearning. This talk tries to give an overview of these efforts and, in spite of the fact that they will be demonstrated for the Portuguese language, it will also try to emphasize how easily they can be extended to new languages

A Meta-model for Developing Simulation Games in Higher Education and Professional Development Training

Games and simulations can be powerful educational tools for higher education and professional development training. At the same time, the labor and technical costs of development is sufficiently high that simulation games tend to be rather static and course or program specific. The main contribution of this paper is an effort to define a new meta-model for educational simulation games that is transferable to a broad range of disciplines and technical training fields. A meta-model provides a formal structure upon which similar categories of game play components are tied to specific learning objectives and easily updatable knowledge content while offering an infinite combination of playing experiences and maintaining consistent pedagogical standards. To illustrate, this paper draws from the application of our meta-model as used in developing a simulation game for software engineering education. Preliminary validation results are presented, in which the meta-model is used as a foundation in the architecture for a game development platform

Developing a Meta-Model for Serious Games in Higher Education

This short paper presents a preliminary meta-model for educational games. A meta-model facilitates the development of high-quality, engaging, educational games because it explicitly ties knowledge requirements, transferable skills and course outcomes to game production. Our meta-model is designed to be transferable across curricula, as it modularizes domain specific bodies of knowledge (BOK), a learning taxonomy (e.g., Bloom\u27s), and skill based challenges. The model situates learning opportunities in a plotline wherein the student-player advances by succeeding against non-player adversaries. Knowledge-based challenges framed by a learning taxonomy develop the transferable skills required by international accreditation standards and provide feedback to both the player and the faculty member. Situating assessment challenges in an immersive game environment makes them more engaging and imaginative than typical on-line tests or assignments. Here, we present our meta-model tailored for educational game development in software engineering education

Towards a Lightweight Approach for Modding Serious Educational Games: Assisting Novice Designers

Serious educational games (SEGs) are a growing segment of the education community’s pedagogical toolbox. Effectively creating such games remains challenging, as teachers and industry trainers are content experts; typically they are not game designers with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to create a quality SEG. Here, a lightweight approach to interactively explore and modify existing SEGs is introduced, a toll that can be broadly adopted by educators for pedagogically sound SEGs. Novice game designers can rapidly explore the educational and traditional elements of a game, with a stress on tracking the SEG learning objectives, as well as allowing for reviewing and altering a variety of graphic and audio game elements