The Event Interaction Game: Understanding Events in the Software Development Context

Abstract

The understanding of the context in which the software applications are developed is highly influenced by events. In fact, any organizational process is intended to be triggered by an event and sometimes is related to certain eventual-type results. Managing and modeling events is one of the most important tasks of the analyst during the software development process, since the behavior of the future software application is revealed by the event interaction. In the traditional way of teaching software engineering, events are commonly taught by means of lectures and “toy” practical projects. However, events are commonly misunderstood in this way of teaching, since they are often mistaken for operations. Also, the way in which an event interacts with each other is not completely understood by the students. Games are student-centered strategies for teaching software engineering concepts. Following a similar strategy to other software engineering games, we propose in this paper the event interaction game as a way to explain the meaning of the events and their interaction for understanding their influence on the software development process. This game is intended to surpass the problems generated by the traditional way of teaching events. The game was played by four heterogeneous groups of students belonging to different courses and universities, and the results are almost the same for such groups, leading to promising results in the understanding of events.