A Software Engineering Education Game in a 3-D Online Virtual Environment

The typical software engineering course consists of a series of lectures in which theories and concepts are communicated, and, in an attempt to put this knowledge into practice, a small software engineering project that the students must develop. But there are simply not enough time and resources for the students to work on a project of a large enough size to exhibit many of the phenomena present in real-world software engineering processes. An approach to address this problem is that allowing the students to participate in a simulate software developing process. We develop a software engineering education game in a 3-D online virtual environment, Second Life. By playing the game, the students understand the correct software developing process. According to the data collected from student surveys, we found that 92.3 percent of the 52 students who play our online software engineering process game thought the games were at least somewhat helpful.