SimSYS: A Game Development Platform for Serious Educational Games

Overview

Software engineering (SE) education has a critical role in preparing the future workforce for careers in an increasingly technical, interconnected world. SE is a knowledge intensive, specialized, rapidly changing discipline; its educational infrastructure faces significant challenges including the need to rapidly, widely, and cost effectively introduce new, revised, or customized course material in diverse educational venues (industry, post-secondary, lifelong learning); encourage the broad participation and retention of students in traditional and non-traditional educational venues; and address changing student demographics, motivations and attitudes, including technology innovations in the classroom such as "clickers".

Educational games have begun to emerge as a means to address challenges that SE educators face. 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; they can be integrated into SE curricula in a wide variety of ways. For example, games can be used as part of a lecture in the classroom (a fun, quiz-based challenge), outside the lecture in a tutorial or lab session (either individually or in study groups), in a brown-bag mini-session, or as an integral part of an e-learning course. While serious educational games are valuable, game development is a lengthy, expensive endeavor. New innovations are needed to support the rapid, semi-automated development of serious games, especially for quickly changing disciplines like SE. In this Microsoft SEIF-seeded exploratory work, we have been researching 1) the use of games as teaching tools and 2) the technical innovations needed to support their rapid, cost effective development. In our project, SimSYS (www.utdallas.edu/~kcooper/SimSYS), we seek to provide a unique, valuable development platform for serious (educational) games, which supports semi-automated game creation, automated player and game assessment, automated game adaptation, and a Game Play Engine. The games, scripted in XML, are organized using Acts, Scenes, and Screens. The games have characters, backdrops, props, and challenges. Characters in the games (player, non-player) are modeled from an agent-oriented perspective . they interact with other characters and their environment and have autonomous behavior to keep the game fresh and interesting. The challenges address specific learning objectives.

SimSYS is being investigated from an interdisciplinary perspective (education, game research, and software) with an international research team. Our research first focused on the requirements and architecture specification for our game platform; the requirements and architecture for the Game Play Engine component; and developing a prototype Game Play Engine. While working on the Game Play Engine prototype with student teams, we discovered the need to define a tailored game engineering methodology to create a more predictable, consistent development environment from term to term. Using the Unified Process methodology, we have defined a tailored use case template to specify game play requirements that supports traceability to learning objectives (e.g., SE2004 knowledge areas, units, topics) and user engagement mechanisms (e.g., challenges, rewards, penalties, competition with an arch-enemy). We have been iteratively developing and applying the use case template to engineer the SimSYS Game Play Engine component and a collection of scripted games. The scripted games include a set of Toy Games, which form the use case view of the Game Play Engine architecture, and the SimSYS Agile Software Development Process game. Research is underway to explore the dynamic player and game assessment and adaptation of games; in the future we plan to continue with the automated game generation component of our platform. In addition, the development of SimSYS has coincided with ongoing research into the effective integration of tools like simulations and serious games into SE the curriculum. Finally, the presentation of SEIF-seeded SimSYS research at several cognate conferences has demonstrated a broader interest in the use of an agent-oriented simulation game in a wider range of disciplines. We plan to investigate how to develop serious games for other areas (e.g., dentistry, law, ethics), increasing the broader impact of this project.

As the game is developed, the design documents and versions of the game will be posted here. These are working documents and will be updated regularly. For example, the draft of our first game scenario is available here A one page summary of our SimSYS project is available here We have a poster at the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T 2011) event Check it out!

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Research Team

This is an interdisciplinary, international collaboration.

Dr. Kendra M.L. Cooper is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science department at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Before joining UTD, Dr. Cooper worked in industry on large-scale, complex projects. Her research specialization is software and systems engineering with a focus on component based engineering and architecture; she has an extensive publication record. Dr. Cooper has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate level courses in computer science and software engineering, including CS 3354 Software Engineering, CS 6354 Advanced Software Engineering, CS 4485 Senior Design Project Course, CS 6362 Advanced Software Architecture and Design and SYSM 6301 Systems Engineering Architecture and Design. Dr. Cooper has supervised students' research at B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. levels; she actively involves independent study students on research projects. Dr. Cooper serves on numerous editorial boards and program committees for the SE community.

Dr. C. Shaun Longstreet is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Marquette University. He has twelve years of higher-education professional development experience, is an award winning educator with fifteen years of online teaching experience. He has presented extensively at peer-reviewed conferences on the subject of teaching with technology in higher-education. Dr. Longstreet also has been in charge of graduate student professional and teaching development in three faculty development positions at research-intensive state universities.

Dr. Alf Inge Wang is an Associate Professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research specialization is software engineering and education and game technology. Dr. Wang has in the recent years developed, evaluated and applied several games used in various software engineering courses at NTNU. He has also years of experiences teaching software architecture using game technology including Microsoft.s XNA framework and the Google's Android framework. Dr. Wang has for several years taught an introductory software engineering course with focus on programming (TDT4105/TDT4110), a software architecture course (TDT4240), a game development course (TDT71) and a mobile development course (TDT48). Dr. Wang has supervised over 70 M.Sc students and 6 Ph.D. students focused on learning technologies, mobile technologies and game technologies, and has been involved in several national and EU-projects related to software engineering and educational games.

Research students (B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.) are actively involved in the project, learning and applying advanced technical skills spanning software engineering, systems engineering, game research, and education topics. In addition, the research students will also be actively involved in supervising and mentoring small teams of independent study students, building leadership and management skills. Independent study students will be a diverse mix of B.Sc. and M.Sc. students. These students will participate in all aspects of the research and development of the game.

Research and Development Student Team (Fall 2011)
Nishant Alva,The University of Texas at Dallas, M.Sc. Computer Science
Bharathi Balasubramaniam, The University of Texas at Dallas, M.Sc. Computer Science
Mahanth Kumar Beeraka, The University of Texas at Dallas, M.Sc. Computer Science
Naveen Krishna Bezawada, The University of Texas at Dallas, M.Sc. Computer Science
Dorian Gorski, The University of Texas at Dallas, B.Sc. Computer Science

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Funding

The SimSYS Project is supported by the Microsoft Software Engineering Innovation Foundation Grant.

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