Pass the ball: Game-based learning of software design

Abstract

Based on our experience using active learning methods to teach object-oriented software design we propose a game-based approach to take the classroom experience into a virtual environment. The different pedagogical approaches that our active method supports, have motivated us to tailor an architecture that supports the creation of different variations of role-play environments, ranging from open-ended trial and error approaches to highly constrained settings where students can not get very far from the solution. We also describe a prototype that instantiates this architecture called ViRPlay3D2. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.