A Virtual World to Educate Software Engineering Students

GUILLERMO RODRÍGUEZ; ALVARO SORIA; DR. MARCELO CAMPO

New Horizons in Creative Open Software, Multimedia, Human Factors and Software Engineering

Blue Herons

Lugar: Bergamo; Año: 2012; p. 34 - 44

One of the main goals of teaching Software Engineering is that students face problems that happen in the real world of software development. To do so, agile approaches emerge as a feasible alternative for student to apply theoretical concepts to practice situations. Particularly, learning an agile approach such as Scrum requires students to perform its process activities in a working environment as real as possible. With this goal in mind, we propose the use of virtual worlds to represent a development environment through virtual elements such as blackboards, browser, document viewers, charts, calendar, and so on. In this paper, we present Virtual Scrum, an educational virtual world focused on learning/teaching strategies to educate Software Engineering students in using Scrum. We used a questionnaire to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of the tool with undergrad students. The results have shown that Virtual Scrum is suitable for teaching student how to implement the different elements in a Scrum team room and to perform the activities throughout the Scrum process.